Four o'clock in the morning
by Vera Rozalsky
Summary: Post-DH by about eight months. Hermione gives her unexpected visitor some bad news.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

**Author's notes:** This little snippet occurs in an alternative universe to _Amends, or Truth and Reconciliation._ It is the first time I heard the voices of Rowling's characters. Rating is for bad language.

***

It's four o'clock in the morning when the outer defenses trip a warning. Hermione has just poured her first cup of coffee for the morning and is waiting for the toast to finish when she feels the tug. Front walk. Someone or something that can actually _see_ this house through the layers of charms that say _boring boring boring_ to any non-magical passer-by. Not that there should be passers-by, of any description, at this hour in this suburban neighborhood.

And there's been no one, these last eight months.

She peeks in the mirror that watches the front walk and the hairs go up on the back of her neck: a hooded figure, all in black. It hesitates on the front step; she can't make out a face in the deep shadow thrown by the hood of the cloak. No reflection, at least, from a silver mask. _Death Eaters don't ring the doorbell, _she reminds herself. _And in any case the war is over. _

A pause, and then there's a soft knock.

She checks the other mirrors; no one in evidence on the perimeter. The foe-glass is dark.

She stands to one side, drops the barrier over the threshold, says, "Come in."

And it—he—lunges, wand out, shouting, "Granger, you're going to tell me what you're doing to me!" Things slow. She steps inside the circle of that arm, seizes the wrist, drops, twists, and the wand clatters on the floor.

She scoops it up, turns, faces him. The hood has dropped back over his shoulders. She sighs.

"Malfoy, you fucking _idiot._"

"Gone native, have we?" he says. "Or should we say, reverted to type?"

His sneer is reflex, she reminds herself. Defense mechanism. He doesn't even _see _you.

"Minimum use of force," she says. "Unless you have a serious death wish, in which case go find someone else to fulfill it for you."

She can't resist adding: "I understand there would be plenty of takers."

The sneer wobbles a little.

"Sorry," she says. "You came in with a question. And I'm surly before I've had my coffee, so if you don't mind, can we talk about this over breakfast?"

***

He accepts a cup of tea, and two slices of toast. She pushes the butter and jam to the center of the table and watches. She occupies herself with her own breakfast and watches his face and listens to the scratch of butter knife against toast. No drama-queen noises about poisoning, so whatever has him bothered, that's not it. She keeps one hand on the captured wand and eats with the other and doesn't take her eyes off that pale pointy face.

She realizes that she's never watched him before at such close quarters, nor under electric light. It's cold, merciless, raking light and under it she sees the fine network of scars over cheekbones and forehead, running up to his eyes. _When the chandelier fell, yes._ She's walked through that memory in the Pensieve, weird and dissociated, picked her way around her own body screaming on the floor to look at the figures on the periphery and it was only a flash before they all disappeared but he was screaming with his hands over his face and blood running between the fingers and his mother lifting or dragging him out of the way.

She's never seen that face under electric light, always under the light of candles or torches or daylight in another world. Not in the kitchen of her parents' house at four o'clock in the morning, buttering toast. Here he isn't her old enemy—or annoyance—from school, but a visitor from another world. Pale hair grown out, combed back from his forehead and hanging loose over his shoulders, not long enough yet to tie back like his father's, severe black robes with just a touch of silver and green embroidery at the collar. Understated Pureblood style. No jeans and T-shirt under that, either, she would guess. The full layered look, muggle clothes under open traditional robes, that's a fashion statement he's not ever likely to make.

Pointy pale face. _Pointy-faced git,_ Ron's sneering epithet. _Ferret._

Look at the face; forget the name-calling. Pointed chin, yes, sharp cheekbones, high forehead under the pale fine hair that flops forward to be absently brushed back. Thinner than she remembers, with a bruised look under the eyes. Not sleeping, evidently. _Nice work, _she thinks, eyeing the almost invisible scars, _whoever repaired that must have done it quickly._ _There's almost no scarring._ She wonders, professionally, if the repairs run over the eyes. He took a face full of broken glass and can still see.

"Beautiful work," she says, and then realizes she spoke aloud. A hazard of living alone. He looks up, meets her eyes, little square of toast halfway to his mouth. Raises one eyebrow.

She traces with a fingertip on her own face. "The cuts from the glass," she says. "From the chandelier… It must have been your mother who healed it."

Arctic grey gaze now, neutral as water, little flecks of blue and green in it like sparks. Mouth in a thin line, nostrils flaring, everything compressed, furious… "Don't talk about my mother."

"No disrespect meant. She does beautiful work." _She really loved you. Loves you. You don't get work that fine without real intention. _Which she knows better than to say aloud.

He finishes the toast, pushes the plate away, puts his hands on the table.

"So tell me what curse it is, Granger, because it must be something obscure."

"I think you need to back up a little. I don't know what you're talking about."

"It takes a pushy mudblood to find something everyone else has forgotten. You haven't been back to Hogwarts. They told me you were _catching up on your reading._ What a joke. I have a good guess what you've been reading."

Her heart starts to race, and she takes a few deep breaths to slow it down.

"Malfoy, if we're going to have a conversation about whatever this is, we're going to drop the name calling. You don't use that word in my house, and I don't call you ferret, inbred git, junior Death Eater wannabe scum… agreed?"

He stares at her another hard second or two, and nods.

_Think of this as another intake._ "So tell me the symptoms."

"I have dreams—when I sleep at all—and you're always in them. When—when you were at the Manor. And the fire in the Room of Hidden Things." His voice quavers a little and he stops to steady. Takes a visible breath, a shallow one—she sees the tension in his neck. "I wake up with my heart racing. And I get them sometimes when I'm awake. Waking nightmares. Something happens and I'm back there. I can't sleep and I can't study. I can't _concentrate_."

"Why do you think this is something I'm doing to you?"

"Because I can't study. And we have NEWTS in two weeks, and I'm not ready. Last year was a waste, and now I can't _study._ And I heard you were taking them too even though you're not at school…" He's glowering now, but he sounds as if he's on the brink of tears.

_Christ and Merlin on a tandem bike, this boy is seriously paranoid. And petty. As if I give a flying fuck about NEWTs at this point._

_But he doesn't know that. _

_Deep breath now. _

"I have the same symptoms," she says. "The nightmares. And I don't sleep very much, and it's disturbed. I'm not normally awake at four in the morning. Or I wasn't, before."

Another pause. _You can say it._

"And you turn up in my nightmares too. Not as a star player, I should confess. I'm afraid your late aunt and Greyback have that honor. But you're there at the periphery. It can't be helped. We were both there."

She pauses, prepares to recite another version of the words she's already said to half a dozen of her friends.

"I don't think this is a curse, either. I've checked mine out with the people who would know. And I know you hold the so-called muggle world in utter contempt, but I crossed the border and had _them _check me out. And I have a diagnosis, which is probably fits your case too. Post-traumatic stress."

He's staring. "Not a curse?"

"Only if being human is a curse. But the bad news is, St. Mungo's doesn't _do_ PTSD counseling. There is help. But you're going to have to cross the border to get it."


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

**Author's notes:** Well, this was going to be complete at Chapter One, given that it's an alternate universe to _Amends_ and the latter is turning into the very _War and Peace_ of fan-fictions. However, enthusiastic reviewers have encouraged me to continue it, and likely there will be a few more chapters.

Special thanks to Silverbirch, whose brilliant and moving fiction _Forgiveness is the Final Form of Love_ inspired the thoughts on border-crossing.

***

Like too much in his life lately, this is not working out as planned.

Draco sips the last of the tea and looks over the rim of the cup at Granger, who has pushed her breakfast dishes to the center of the table and is looking at him with the characteristic expression—eyes narrowed in curiosity rather than hostility—that had followed him through six years at Hogwarts.

She's plainly waiting for a reaction to her assertion that no one at St. Mungo's could help him. He is _not_ going to give her the satisfaction. It does relieve him, somewhat, to find out that Granger the war hero had gotten the same response: "No spell damage, no signature for any known curse; you're in good health."

Except in his case, he could hear the Healer, a very junior one who'd just finished her training, think: _more's the pity, you Death Eater scum._ If it wasn't the tattoo, then it was his face—no mistaking who his father was—and now Granger is telling him that the Muggles might have something he wants. Not a possibility he'd ever considered.

"So," he says. "How does one cross the border?"

She puts both wands in her pocket and carefully backs away from the table, keeping her eyes on him the whole time, fishes in the pocket of the coat that's hanging on a peg by the door, and brings out a dainty, sparkling blue evening bag—rather a surprising item for this girl even to own, who's dressed in a Weird Sisters T-shirt and black drawstring trousers. She reaches into it, rummages about, pulls out a wallet.

She opens the wallet, and spreads out an assortment of cards on the table.

"Does any of this look familiar?"

He looks at her, suspecting a trick, and she looks back at him steadily. He picks up the cards, one at a time, turns them over; they all have her name on them, in raised letters or flat, on hard smooth surfaces. Several have pictures, frozen Muggle photographs that don't flatter her at all. They make her look pale and dangerous.

Well, that's not far from the truth.

He shakes his head. She repeats the question, "Do you have anything like this? Might your parents have a box squirreled away? Because if you don't have any of these, you don't exist."

He shakes his head.

"No, I don't suppose they would," she says. "_Toujours pur_ and all that. Unfortunately, the National Health Service doesn't take Pureblood attitude as identification." She sighs, and shakes her head. "Well, you're not the only one with this problem."

He stands up and she watches him. There's a picture on the sideboard that he's been looking at all this time, another of those static photos, and it's plainly Granger, with someone else, standing on a high place overlooking grey moors, under a lowering sky; she and her companion are both bundled in Muggle walking clothes, and they're laughing, arms around each other and hair blowing about their faces. He picks it up to look more closely. She glares at him, and he puts it down again.

"So you've gotten over Weasley," he says. He saw the article in the _Prophet _six months back, and the coverage since about the reclusive war hero who refuses interviews.

"None of your business, Malfoy, unless you want me to ask if the _Prophet_ was right about your mother."

Direct hit, of course; he flinches. That's a sore point—all those photographs of his very pregnant mother, and the speculation as to who the father is, given that Lucius Malfoy is in Azkaban. He knows more than he'd like about his parents' brief second honeymoon on the eve of the trials, but it burns that they'd speculate—that Rita Skeeter would speculate—

"Don't talk about my mother."

"Then stick to business, Malfoy. Do you want to cross the border or not? I'm getting together a petition for Shacklebolt, and I need to know who's on it." She folds her arms and looks at him. "There are plenty of Pureblood citizens of wizarding Britain with the same problem you have. You're an annoying little bigot, but the Wizengamot certified you harmless."

He doesn't like to remember that, either, being chained in the stone chair and then finding out he was only a witness. They'd menaced him with life in Azkaban. After all, he had cast the Unforgivables, well two of them for certain, and they'd only let him off charges of the Killing Curse because of Potter's testimony and the posthumous Pensieve depositions from Snape. At the very last, when he thought that the Dementors were coming for him, he was questioned at length about the Dark Lord's stay at the Manor--questioned, though, with his left arm chained in place so that all in the court could see the Mark on it.

And he's immortalized in a thousand photographs of a pale skinny boy in Azkaban grey, terrified and dirty and on the verge of tears.

"Personally, I thought they played you rather a nasty trick," she says.

He looks at her, expecting that it's sarcasm, but the expression on her face is perfectly serious. He's really at the end of his rope, and if the offer is a serious one, if _Shacklebolt_ really means to extend help to the likes of him …

"Put me on the list, then," he says.

***


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

The whole business had been peculiar from the very outset. Mary Esmond was used to the discreet clientele of Drs. Burgess and Rosencrantz; every once in a while they saw a fair number of taciturn young men with very short hair, who wore civilian dress as if it were a costume. Those were the words Jackie gave her, years ago, when she first tried to tell her _what_ was odd about how they carried themselves.

Jackie said yes, there were people who wore their clothes as if they had just received them from the costume shop and hadn't had a chance to rehearse in them. She'd said the same, the one time she and Mary had unexpectedly encountered Dr. Rosencrantz at the National Gallery, wearing jeans and a black jumper, but looking as if she were at a costume ball; Mary realized that Dr. Rosencrantz looked far more at ease in her discreet tweeds and white laboratory coat.

The advance man, in retrospect, was the only one of the whole lot who fit the usual profile: a tall dark man with a deep reassuring voice and the silent tread of a trained combat specialist. The referral came from _highest levels,_ which Mary realized with a start in the middle of the first orientation actually meant Ten Downing Street.

What was his name—"Call me Kingsley," he said, with a shrewd warm smile—Mr. Kingsley, then, had said that there were certain _special arrangements_ to be made for this particular group of veterans of a most secret conflict. It was most essential that no one in the office tell what they had seen or heard, and this was to be ensured.

Mary Esmond was a little insulted by this, because after years in that place she was nothing if not discreet. Never had the name nor the particulars of a patient passed her lips.

Nonetheless he insisted upon an odd little ceremony, with the waving of a sort of conductor's baton and the muttering of some Latin prayer. It was brief enough, and then Mr. Kingsley said with an air of assurance that there would be no inadvertent revelations of his veterans' personal details, because it would not be possible.

Then she and the doctors were given the roster of names, some of them quite ordinary and others, most peculiar. The two that stuck out, because they seemed to have wandered in from a Restoration comedy (how Jackie loved those): Percy Weasley and Narcissa Malfoy.

She and Jackie always loved that game, making up characters to go with names encountered at random.

"It would be Sir Percy Weasley, Baronet," Jackie would say. "And of course it's Miss Narcissa Malfoy—what a wonderful name! I can just picture her: blonde flibbertigibbet in sausage curls, with a décolletage. And Sir Percy is fifty and fat, and Miss Narcissa is eighteen and something of an adventuress, or maybe it's her mother who is…"

Of course, on the rare occasions that Mary made up a character to match a name on a list, she was invariably wrong, and this was no different.

***

On first reviewing the roster, she notices that there are rather a lot of women—more than she's yet seen in any of these groups—and on the very first day, it seems that at least one of them is an officer—an impression later confirmed, as most of the other patients defer to her—but most unmilitary, with wild bushy hair, that she brushes back absently as she outlines the protocol in her careful Received Pronunciation, so BBC-precise that Mary has no doubt that the girl's grandparents had spoken quite differently. Granger, the name is, one of the relatively ordinary names on the list. (Of course, Mary wonders if that's always been the family name.) She has the manner not of a soldier, but of a precocious graduate student, or a newly minted PhD, brash and somewhat pedantic, and she's ridiculously young (not quite twenty, if her forms are correct).

The men are no less strange, in conspicuously _not fitting the profile_, and this is clear from the moment she glimpses the advance guard. The first day, it's this Granger person, accompanied by a hefty young man with a Lancashire accent, wearing a rugby shirt and rather grubby jeans.

He immediately fixates on the sorry state of the rubber plant by the door, and proffers some suggestions for ensuring its health and long life.

Mary explains to him that there is a service that comes to the office once a week to see to the plants, whereupon he frowns and tells her solemnly that this is a living thing and not a piece of furniture. He stares at her (in puzzled disapproval), and then at the plant (with an expression of tender solicitude) and says he'll take care of it, as he is going to be coming to the office regularly.

She glances over the roster to look him up, when he offers his hand and introduces himself, "Neville Longbottom."

She remembers that she'd consigned that name to the chorus of comic bit players, perhaps not without justification. None of the young men who have visited the clinic over the years has ever said so much as a word about the rubber plant, and this one is going on about how the noble _Ficus elastica_ attains heights of eighty feet in its native rain forest, which makes the specimen in the office something on the order of a bonsai, or more accurately, a stunted child.

Granger and Longbottom then establish themselves with tea and biscuits to greet and situate the rest of the patients, who begin arriving less than half an hour later.

The first six patients straggle in three to five minutes apart, as Mary counts by the clock over the filing cabinet. The Red-Headed League, she nicknames them mentally, for they all share the same flaming red hair and freckled faces. After she checks the third set of forms against the roster, she realizes that they share the same surname (Weasley), and the roster indicates a whole family of them. She's seen the very rare pairs of brothers in their ordinary clientele, but this is unusual in the extreme: there are _five_ brothers, four of whom are scheduled for this day and the fifth on the next day, with his rather tony wife (so she conjectures from the hyphenated surname).

Percy Weasley, it turns out, is the tall thin one with the fez and the spectacles, and he is a most unmilitary-looking fellow (nor does he in the least resemble the middle-aged baronet of her imagination). Once he fills out his forms with a certain punctilious flourish, he interests himself in the health and safety posters, as well as the rack of brochures, which he devours in attentive silence.

His brothers leaf through the magazines on the table in the waiting room and comment to each other that the pictures are oddly static. (Photographers, no doubt, from their tone of assurance.)

Last of all, looking somewhat flustered, arrives the older man with thinning flyaway red hair, whom she thinks at first might be their officer, but turns out to be their father (Arthur, it says in the roster). He shows a most peculiar interest in the ball-point pen at the check-in desk, as well as the light fixtures and the electric outlets set into the wall. Rather than reading magazines, he spends his waiting time tracing all of the electric cords from the lamps and radio to the walls—most disconcerting, although not dangerous.

In any case, if he _were_ dangerous, there is McConnell. Mr. Kingsley had said that he would have one of _their own people_ on duty, just in case. Hence McConnell—brown hair cut in a sharp bob angled along her jaw, and the most inconspicuous face that Mary had ever seen. Whatever McConnell does, she is very good at it, as Mary can't even remember her face when she thinks about it after work.

On the other hand, she has had problems with memory, ever since Jackie…

… ever since the last night she saw Jackie, now almost three years ago, the night whose end she cannot remember. Only that she's never been back to that flat, and whenever her feet wander in that direction, something deep in her chest tells her, _don't._

At any rate, Mary is not sure what sort of army this is—certainly they seem to have been involved in some sort of covert operations—but whoever they are, they are unlike any she'd ever seen.

***

The next day, the routine establishes itself. Once more, the advance guard of Granger and Longbottom; once more, Longbottom casts an indignant glance in the direction of the rubber plant, while Granger reviews the roster and adds tick marks against the names for that day's arrivals.

Five of them, four blonds and a ginger, to be exact.

The first arrival—a lovely girl whose blonde glory absolutely glows, far brighter than one would expect for the slight swell of early pregnancy under her elegantly draped tunic—disconcerts Mary. Her eyes irresistibly gravitate to the girl's face and figure, in spite of the plain signal that she is _spoken for:_ not only the belly but the solicitous husband, one of the Red-Headed League, whose scarred face makes it quite clear he's seen combat, and been lucky to escape alive.

Mary Esmond is a thorough professional, and she certainly has never had a problem with eyeing up the patients before—well, it might be that they were mostly men—but there's something about this one that's _most_ distracting…

The next arrivals are a boy and girl in their late teens, whose similar pale coloring makes her think they might be brother and sister, but apparently they're not. They sit as far as possible from each other in the waiting room. The girl smiles vaguely into the middle distance and the boy carefully avoids eye contact with her. The girl's hair is in violation of regulations in any army on earth, as it cascades in long flaxen waves past her waist, and she's wearing most peculiar earrings: ceramic globules that look nearly _exactly_ like radishes. Her expression is beatific and somewhat abstracted: more mad scientist than soldier, that one.

The boy she mistook for the brother is lanky and thin and sharp-faced, what Jackie called the "you-will-be-shot-at-dawn" school of blond: naturally suited to play the SS officer hanging about the periphery of a World War II drama by way of ornamental menace. He strides up to the counter to sign in, his posture radiating aristocratic hauteur, and then looks about in puzzlement. The ball-point pen on its chain lies close to hand, but he's frowning as if he expects to see something else.

The bushy-haired Sergeant Granger (she's tentatively assigned the girl rank as an NCO, given the way that the others react to her) sees his confusion, steps up to the desk, and demonstrates the writing implement and its use, then places it in his hand.

He flinches as her fingers brush his, frowns at her, and then inclines his rather sharp chin in an acknowledging nod. Then he pulls the forms toward him and starts filling them out with excruciating slowness and attention, as if he were doing so in a foreign language. He is definitely one of the ones in _stage costume_. His clothes are new but quite ordinary—black pleated trousers, a charcoal-grey jumper, and a crisp white dress shirt, under the V-neck of the jumper—but in spite of their elegant drape, he wears them as if they did not fit.

It's not only his costume that is monochrome; he looks like a black and white photograph of a young man. As he frowns in concentration over the forms, the only color is the glimpse of pink tongue in the corner of his thin-lipped mouth.

Mary Esmond reads the name upside down, and remembers her mental groan on first reading the roster. _Some people ought to think before they name their children. _

The last member of this mostly blond cohort, whom at first she takes for the eldest sister, enters a little behind the boy: an absolutely stunning blonde dressed all in black. She's wearing an opera cloak or the like, under which Mary glimpses a floor-length fall of black velvet. _La belle dame sans merci,_ she thinks, as she meets those piercing blue eyes, cold as jewels in a face with nearly perfect bone structure.

The boy—her younger brother? at any rate, not so lucky an inheritor of the family beauty as his presumed sister—shows her the pen and whispers something in her ear, as she lowers those marvelous eyes and writes, then pushes the completed form back across the desk to Mary.

This, according to the form, is the actual Narcissa Malfoy. Mary stares at the birth date—1955—incredulous that this blonde vision is forty-four years old… and, yes, a mother, or at least that's how the boy next addresses her in his petulant aristocratic drawl.

That's the first McConnell speaks to her. "Not for the likes of us, my girl," she says, with an utterly deadpan expression that nonetheless conveys a nod and a wink.

When Narcissa Malfoy doffs her long cloak, it's clear that she's pregnant (as Jackie would say, "Very pregnant indeed") and when she turns to sit down, assisted with old-fashioned chivalry by her son, her long shining hair cascades down her back like a waterfall seen by moonlight.

Two pregnant blondes, a brother and sister who aren't, and none of the lot of them seem to be familiar with the use of a pen. (Curiouser and curiouser, Jackie would say, quoting _Alice._) According to Mr. Kingsley, all of them—and there are more to come on succeeding days—are veterans of a most secret war that has been in progress for decades, _on English soil,_ and which has only ended this past May.

***


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

Four o'clock in the morning again, and this time Hermione actually hears the doorbell.

She is quite wide awake, still jet-lagged from her trip to Australia. It had taken quite a while to arrange that. With the slowness of international diplomacy in the wizarding world, it had been months after the war crimes trials that Australia had consented to let in any representatives of the rogue nation that had lately threatened the world with their Dark Lord. Never mind that Voldemort had never been _her_ Dark Lord; as a Briton, she was tarred with the same brush as the Death Eaters.

That was the effect of foreshortening; from the other side of the planet, wizarding Britain no doubt looked like a nation of crazed Dark witches and wizards.

Then there had been the time and trouble of securing the services of one of St. Mungo's top Spell Damage experts, who accompanied her there on her first visit to her parents. It had turned out that the memory charm she had done was at the high end of magical memory editing, with its safe-house for the original memories and its maze of indirection, not to mention the parallel things she'd done with computer records in the Muggle world.

(Which was part of how she'd managed to live apart from the wizarding world for months and do just fine for income; she had more skills than those taught at Hogwarts. But that is quite a separate question at the moment.)

After one last check of the foe-glass, she drops the barriers and lets the visitor in.

It's Malfoy again, this time not in a sinister hooded robe but a very elegant lined cloak, intermediate in style between the wizarding world and the Muggle nineteenth century. The first words out of his mouth are a reproach.

"Granger, where _were_ you? I kept coming here and you weren't answering the door." He sounds sulky, as always, though by no means as high-strung as on his first visit.

"I was in Australia," she says, although there's no reason he needs to know this.

He stands the bottle on the table. "Mother insisted I bring this," he says. It's dark, cobwebbed, with something red gleaming inside. Hermione suppresses a shudder; it looks as if it's been fetched up from the depths of some medieval dungeon, or decanted from Poe's cask of Amontillado.

Her silence must read to him as ignorance, because he huffs at her, "Elf-made wine, you barbarian. What did you _think_ it was?"

Leave it to Malfoy to present a gift and an insult in the same breath.

He unclasps his cloak, revealing his Muggle costume: the black trousers, grey jumper, and white dress shirt. He's a bit more at ease in those clothes now; she remembers the first day in the waiting room when he kept his cloak wrapped around him, she realizes now because he wasn't used to clothes that showed so much of the outline of his body. She never would have suspected him of modesty.

He looks about for a place to hang the cloak; she indicates the coat rack by the door. He's already learned that there are no servants in her house, neither Elves nor humans, so he hangs it up himself. It gives her the shudders how _normal_ he looks in those clothes. Even his hair, which is rather longer than Muggle regulation, wouldn't make him stand out particularly on the London streets; he could be a young musician or actor, instead of a middling-unsuccessful junior assassin with a war criminal for a father.

"What business did you have in the Antipodes?" he asks.

"My parents." He frowns. "I had to hide them away from _your lot_ during the war, if you must know." She looks at the dark bottle standing on her parents' sideboard. "So why the wine?"

"I know you'll be taking it to Slughorn to have it checked for poisons," he says, "and anyway, Mother thought jewelry would be in bad taste, considering that business with the opal necklace." Vintage Malfoy, that; no information at all. "She thought you might like a little touch of luxury, since things have … not been good." He actually pinks up a bit. "And… she's grateful. For the help, you know."

She had put Narcissa Malfoy's name on the list, knowing from the testimony at the trial that she likely had post-traumatic stress as well. Much as Hermione didn't like her or Lucius, Narcissa was in a position not dissimilar from a widow, less the respectability.

At the clinic, it had been difficult to greet Narcissa and get her settled as if she were any other patient. During the ordeal at the Manor, Hermione hadn't had the benefit of nearsightedness like Harry; Narciss Malfoy's face had engraved itself on her memory during the adrenalin-stretched eternity before Bellatrix took her into the drawing room to torture her. It's that face she remembers in her nightmares, that and the shadowy, maniacal visage of Bellatrix. Odd thing about Bellatrix, that she's never quite in focus in any of those nightmares, but the paler sister is.

Draco had hung back, not making eye contact with any of them, so while she remembers him, it's not quite the same way as his mother. When she closes her eyes, she can count Narcissa's eyelashes, and note ironically the similarity of her bone structure to that of her cousin Sirius Black and her niece Tonks: the same heart-shaped face, pointed chin, and sharp-cut, mobile mouth: scornful on Narcissa, cynical on Sirius, and mischievous on Tonks.

Neville had seen the difficulty she was in and had stepped in, soothing Madam Malfoy with the appropriate Pureblood courtesies. Neville fascinates her; he seems the very picture of an ordinary Muggle bloke much of the time, except when he has to deal with _one of them,_ and then someone else emerges, a young grandee well versed in archaic politesse.

"I hope she's keeping well," Hermione says, feeling foolish, _asking after the health_ of the woman whose face is her personal icon of terror. "Thank her for the wine. I do appreciate the gesture."

And yes, he's right; she'll have it very thoroughly assayed for Potions, curses, and other nasty booby-traps. The darkly gleaming vessel, netted with cobwebs, stands there as a reminder of the existence of that other world, the one that claims her as a citizen and almost killed her. It makes her more than a little nervous, that it's sitting here in _her parents' house._

Ignoring her guest, she casts a Patronus and sends it on its way to Hogwarts. Slughorn is a sybarite, but he keeps a Potion Master's nocturnal hours and likely is awake even now.

"You don't waste time," he says.

She looks at him. He picks up the picture on the sideboard, the one from her walking tour in Lancashire, and looks at it. "That's Longbottom, isn't it? I didn't recognize him in Muggle togs." He frowns, and Hermione knows that he's trying to puzzle out the difference. To be fair, Ron and Harry had had the same reaction. She knows what that difference is: ease, for he's on his home ground, and something like happiness. That picture was taken by Neville's primary-school friend Andrew after most of a day's ramble, twenty miles or so. It was a party of four: she and Neville and Andrew and Andrew's girlfriend Miranda, to whom he's to be married at midsummer.

Andrew and Miranda are alive because Augusta Longbottom and her wizarding neighbors in Lancashire took care of their own in the _late unpleasantness._

There's a _crack _outside, and she opens the door to Horace Slughorn in his green brocaded dressing-gown. He bows to her and sweeps in, entirely ignoring Malfoy. "Miss Granger, my pleasure as always. Is that the offending object?"

She nods, and Slughorn takes the bottle very firmly by the neck, supporting its rounded base as if it were a baby or a cat. "Very fine vintage," he says, in a connoisseur's tones, "Harvest of 1789, if I do recall aright. If it's free of _difficulties,_ it will be a pleasure to drink. You have not tasted elf-made wine, I trust?"

She shakes her head. No, she hasn't had much time to taste any of the luxuries of _that _world.

He looks at the hallmark on the bottle. "Cellars of Malfoy Manor. Yes, I see why you might want to have this assayed. Rest assured, I shall be thorough." He adds, "It was a pity about your friend Rupert, and it shan't happen again."

He never has gotten Ron's name right, even after the Order of Merlin. He still talks about how Lily Evans married too young, and she wonders if he had Ron pegged as yet another despoiler of youthful talent, like James Potter.

"I'll send you an Owl when I'm finished," he says, and makes a slight courteous bow before Apparating from the front walk, just inside the first layer of Muggle-repelling charms.

She turns back to see Malfoy with his arms folded over his chest as if in defiance or disdain, though when she looks more closely he's hugging himself as if chilled to the bone.

"You seem to have a knack for arriving in time for breakfast," she says, carefully averting her glance as he blinks away the tears she is pretending she didn't see. Slughorn gives him flashbacks, apparently. "There's plenty of toast, and I bought some fruit conserve and lemon curd."

Actually, she bought them in anticipation of the return of her mother, whose favorite treats they are, but she can always buy more if her uninvited guest puts too much of a dent in the stores.

***


	5. Chapter 5

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

Granger puts out the breakfast things, and Draco notices that the selection of food is somewhat more bountiful than before. This largesse isn't for him, of course. He does know how to connect the dots, and he assumes she has replenished the larder in anticipation of her parents' return to Britain. Left to herself, Granger has rather monkish habits.

He wonders if they ever reproached her about that, as his father reproached him for his excessive love of sweets.

He doesn't like thinking about his father, especially when he realizes that Granger's father is still alive, and presumably abroad in the world breathing the air of freedom. More than can be said of his own… He takes a shaky breath and lets it out, because he can feel tears welling up when he thinks about his father—even ordinary things, like coming downstairs to the sound of his parents' voices on the terrace in summer. The Manor is much too quiet lately, but at least he's sleeping now. His mother is not happy, exactly—he doubts she'll ever be happy again—but she looks more clear-eyed and well-rested, since they've been going to the odd electric-lit place in the heart of Muggle London.

No, he corrects himself, all along they have lived, unknowingly, in the heart of Muggle Britain; it surrounds them. His world is a little kernel of normality in a vast surround of alien habitation. They have lived hidden from the common enemy on the other side of the wall of the Leaky Cauldron for three hundred years, and now it is that enemy that is rendering them succor.

His mother is sleeping through the night for the first time since the war, difficult as that is in her advanced state of pregnancy.

On the second visit, Fleur Delacour-Weasley had invited his mother over to share her bountiful portion of take-away, when she saw that they had neglected to bring anything to eat. There's a freemasonry of pregnant women which acts as a sort of flag of neutrality.

He'd hung back because he still can't look at Bill Weasley's horribly scarred face without knowing that it's his handiwork.

***

Granger has put on hot water for tea, setting the kettle on the stove top and turning one of the knobs; a ring of blue flame, like bluebell flames, springs up beneath it. He frowns; there's no crackle of magic in this place, which makes him feel all the more keenly the aura that dances delicately over her skin. He's lived all his life saturated in it, and this place… this feels weirdly awkward, with its vast pools of empty space between them, that are inhabited by something else. The presence of someone else of _his own kind_ is oddly welcome…

He picks up his wand to help things along, and she shakes her head sharply. "No, you'll fry my electronics doing that."

He watches the condensation play over the surface of the tea kettle and then vanish entirely as the flames play beneath, and a delicate wreath of steam puffs from its spout. She pours out the hot water into a small teapot (for him) and then the rest into a conical vessel on top of her coffee cup (for her).

She looks at him, straight into the eyes. "Are you sleeping well?" Rather too personal a question, but then he first had come to her house at four o'clock in the morning to extract an answer as to why he _wasn't_ sleeping well, so it's fair enough.

"Better than before," he says, watching the tea leaves swirl in the bottom of the pot. Daft Professor Trelawney would make something of that, no doubt. Granger catches his eye and unexpectedly picks up the thought.

"It's always the shape of a Grim, or else a skull," Granger says with a smirk. "I never did care for tea, but I'd no idea it was a _dangerous_ habit until I came to Hogwarts."

She sets the conical vessel in the sink, and breathes in the steam from her coffee cup as if she were incensing her hair. Granger's morning coffee is obviously a solemn rite. It's still too hot to drink, but she breathes in the smell of it, with her hands clasped around the cup. He would hurry it along with a touch of a cooling charm, but of course she doesn't use magic in this place. It would… what did she say? … _fry_ her esoteric Muggle things.

Last week, Arthur Weasley had come into the waiting room one morning with a message for his son Bill, and had fallen to explaining Muggle magic. Apparently the Muggles have their own form of magic, which uses all of the other forces of the world _besides_ magic. Draco had tried not to look interested, but couldn't help listening. There were _fascinating_ magazines in the office, Arthur said, and the woman at the front desk had explained to him how he might find more materials on the question. So he's to be receiving a library card… just like an actual Muggle.

From the tone, you would think that someone had just told him he was to be appointed Minister for Magic.

Draco says, "They canceled the sitting of the NEWTs. Did you have something to do with that?" The question has been bothering him for some time.

Granger shakes her head. "No, Kingsley's idea. No one who was at Hogwarts last year is in any condition to take them." She adds, "And there's the whole business of the distorted admissions policies last year. We made a mistake thinking we could just pretend everything was normal."

She says "we" as if she still belonged to his world.

She continues, "It's too ugly to sort out all in one go. Best to level the ground first, and clean up the damage from the rubbish that the Carrows were teaching." She makes a sour face.

He remembers all too vividly how sick that made him, to be assigned _Crucio _in the Dark Arts class, after he'd been playing the torturer's apprentice all through August, till the Death Eaters glared at him every time he walked into a room; he knew that if anything happened to his father or Bella, he'd be thrown to them for their entertainment.

And _Crucio_ would have been the least of it.

And after all they made him sit through at the trials… and behind closed doors, as well. There's nothing like having your head pushed into a Pensieve and being forced to witness _all the details … _ he'd had no idea. Really. The fire, and the blood, and the screams of children, no idea at all what "Muggle-baiting" had meant, what he'd been calling down every time he said that they should _kill the filthy animals _…

***

He doesn't realize that he's fallen down the well of memory until that voice across the table calls him back.

Cool, firm hands gently unwrap his fingers from the teacup he's been clutching, and someone hands him a clean handkerchief, and when his hands tremble too hard to take hold of it, those same hands take it back, and wipe the tears and snot from his face.

"I think we should talk about something else," Granger says, her voice as cool and decisive as her hands. "I didn't know that was going to give you a flashback."

At least he didn't completely disgrace himself. Weeping is bad enough, but the last time, he had vomited.

"It's time we ate breakfast," she says.

So they do, very carefully following the instructions of Dr. Burgess, to _remain in the present,_ and he wishes once more that he'd known half of this before the war. He might not have taken everything for granted: sweets and fresh air and sunlight and sleep, his father and mother at the breakfast table. Knowing wholeness, he might not have loaned destruction such a powerful glamour.

***


	6. Chapter 6

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

Jackie used to say that the human animal was distinguished by its ability to adapt to nearly any conditions, no matter how bizarre or inhuman. Mary Esmond rather agrees.

They come in and they occupy the waiting room, with their cacophony of regional accents, as if someone had swooped down and recruited a handful of soldiers from every locality in the British Isles. There's the Finnegan boy, a Dubliner if she ever heard one; Thomas, a Londoner whose voice still retains some of the warm lilt of Jamaica; the too-precise Sergeant Granger, from the suburbs of London; Longbottom from Lancashire; the Patil sisters, some generations from the Indian subcontinent ...

Jackie would have said: feast your ears. Forget your middle-class obsession about how many points above or below you they are. New York had taught her that lesson; she'd studied the Method there, studied voice for the stage, and practiced on all of the accents she heard on the streets. Coming back to London—what an irony, that she'd survived dangerous New York and come back to London, only to—

Coming back to London, Jackie had _sung_ the plebeian tones from taxicab and pub, the pretentious plummy tones from shop counter and posh club, as if she'd never heard anything so exquisite. And more magical yet, she could turn into those people. That's what an actress was… no, an _actor,_ Jackie would insist. An actress is a rich man's mistress. An actor is an artist. An actor is a shape-shifter, a magical creature.

Mary Esmond still isn't sure what to call them, these folk of the special dispensation. They don't name themselves, so she has no idea what regiment they are. There was a poem Jackie used to quote,about how _an army of lovers cannot fail. _That's the nickname she's given them, finally, after she saw Sergeant Granger kissing her fellow liaison officer in the hallway, her wiry arms around his neck and his arms enfolding her, his large capable workman's hands resting with curious primness just at her waist. It reminded her of those pictures from the end of the Second World War, sailors and soldiers and civilian girls embracing in the streets.

The rubber plant has never looked healthier.

There have been yet more curious visitors. Not only the Army of Lovers—well, they are also the Army of Mothers and Fathers, even the Army of Cheeky Teenagers, to judge from the red-haired girl who had a spat with her equally red-headed mother apparently about keeping too-late hours with her boyfriend—but some of their auxiliaries have put in an appearance as well.

There was, for example, the one she nicknamed the Rock Star, not so much for his unprepossessing appearance but the way all eyes turned to him when he entered the room: a skinny boy of middling height with permanently disheveled black hair and NHS-issue spectacles. Whatever his role was in the late war, it was both substantial and mysterious; none of them, even McConnell, will specify what it is that he did, only that it had quite a bit to do with the war being over, with a favorable outcome.

For the last few weeks there also has been the Distinguished Consultant. Never mind that this woman has that look of wearing a costume when she comes in arrayed in traditional white coat and stethoscope; Mary Esmond knows the species well, and this personage is a Medical Demigod. She is sitting in with Drs. Burgess and Rosencrantz, to learn the techniques so that they can be applied "among our own," is how she puts it.

***

It's only recently that it's settled on her that there were two sides in this war, and they're both represented in the waiting room. The pregnant widow is apparently no widow at all, but has a husband in prison… a _bad lot,_ is all that McConnell will say. He won't be seeing daylight any time these twenty years, if he survives it.

The very grimness with which she says that brings a cold breath of the Middle Ages into the room, as if he were serving his sentence in a grim castle wreathed in the mists of the North Sea, rather than a climate-controlled warehouse for the socially dangerous. McConnell, Addie McConnell, Adelaide but all her friends call her Addie so she insists that Mary follow that usage as well, lost a sister, a brother, and her closest friend in the war. No, she's not forgiving.

Of the fate of the brother and the sister she won't say more than that there was nothing much to bury.

Of the friend… well, she died in combat. The last battle, the one that made the difference, the one where the Rock Star did whatever it was that he did… and it was a shame, because they went through training together and she'd never known anyone more full of life. It's when she shows the picture of her dead friend that Mary knows that this is more than the usual Most Secret crowd.

By some high-tech miracle, there's a film loop embedded in the photographic paper, and on the other side of the glossy surface, a girl with pink spiky hair, a heart-shaped face and a cheeky grin waves at them, and _winks_ at McConnell. It's marvelously lifelike, and even seems to respond to them, as if it were some sentient bit of magic rather than the most amazing piece of digital technology Mary has ever seen.

McConnell says her friend was one of the best that Dimly was ever lucky to recruit, Kingsley said so, and they were lucky to have Kingsley in charge now, since he's Dimly too by training. Mary has trouble parsing that until she notices the discreet crimson letters DMLE on the sleeve cuff of McConnell's black T-shirt.

She knows better than to ask what it is those letters abbreviate, and McConnell doesn't offer.

***

It was only a matter of time, of course, with two pregnant women in the waiting room, and the Black Widow (so Mary has nicknamed her) quite far along, before the expected emergency came to pass.

Well, it would have seemed quite straightforward: a pregnant woman whose water breaks in the waiting room ought to go directly to hospital, but an unexpected fracas breaks out.

The son, of course, is useless in the crisis; for some reason, this doesn't much surprise Mary. When his mother suddenly looks seriously discomfited and whispers in his ear, he turns bright red and flees to the hall. As the door swings shut, Mary hears him shout, "Granger!" the volume of the exclamation at odds with the cut-glass accent.

He returns a moment or so later, with brisk, sensible Sergeant Granger at his elbow.

She takes him aside, and hisses, "Calm down, Malfoy. It happens all the time. You're living proof." There's a fierce exchange of whispers, and she says, "She can perfectly well give birth here." The boy's indignant reaction would be more appropriate if she'd told him his mother would be giving birth in a field or alley rather than a modern London hospital.

"Derwent will settle it, then," Granger says, and vanishes through the doors once more; Mary startles to hear a loud _crack_ in the hallway, but the boy shakes his head when she gets up to investigate.

"It's _perfectly all right,_" he says. Apparently it is, because a moment later Granger returns, this time accompanied by the visiting Medical Demigod. These people seem to have an instinct for showing up at the right moment, is all Mary can think; she wishes some of the consultants she's had to do with over the years would have been so prompt.

The four of them—Derwent, Granger, the Black Widow, and her son—leave together, before Mary can give them the appropriate paperwork.

***

_In the real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning._

No, Jackie's favorite American author was wrong about that. It's more like four o'clock in the morning, when you've lost all faith that there's a morning, when it seems that there will be darkness forever, and you're tired from waiting.

Recently, something uneasy is rearing its head, a sense of something lurking under the surface of everyday life. Her feet have tried to take her back to Jackie's flat, and the answering voice under her ribs has said no, but now she's aware of them arguing.

It comes to a crisis with the next cohort. More young fighters in the Army of Lovers, the second wave, McConnell tells her, the ones they've only recently convinced to seek help. More of the youngsters who pulled off the victory in this mysterious last battle, which appears to have taken place somewhere in Scotland.

It's the name, the name on the roster, that name … Jackie used to assure her that her family was one of the few in England with that odd surname, but she was thinking of changing it all the same. Too odd for the stage.

Susan Bones. And the girl who answers to that name… looks remarkably like Jackie.

Jackie Bones, who is _dead._ _Jackie Bones is dead_. She's tried on that sentence recently, and the fog in her head is clearing. Jackie Bones is dead, and has been dead these last three years, and Mary Esmond has been stumbling through life in a grey confusion that has not been only grief… but an entire avoidance of the subject.

Which now feels very much as if it had been imposed from the outside, if that were possible.

***

**Author's notes: **

"In the real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning." Quoted (more or less correctly) from F. Scott Fitzgerald. _The Crack-up._

"An army of lovers cannot fail." Plato, by way of Rita Mae Brown.


	7. Chapter 7

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

It's four o'clock in the morning, and the windows are open to the spring darkness, with its seductive scent of flowering trees, the ones that Hermione's mother planted in the garden when they first bought the house. The Granger house is the only one in this suburban neighborhood whose windows are lit at this hour, and the only one whose front room is full of conversation.

They are all jet-lagged and giddy with relief and this has been the state of things for some days. No one is sure what is going to happen next, but the Drs. Granger are on holiday from their Australian home and their British expatriate identities as Monica and Wendell Wilkins. Once more, Hermione's parents are savoring the subtle seductions of an English spring.

It all turned out well, and they're back.

Hermione can scarcely believe it, even now. The memory that most worried her, the recollection of all the preparation and her parents' repeated consent, was restored along with all the rest, so there isn't the storm of recrimination that she had feared.

She doesn't even want to think about the number of things she had feared; they come tumbling in on her, now, each night (or morning) as she falls asleep, the things she hadn't dared to think about at the time, because she didn't have a choice about doing this, the way you have no choice in a field hospital with incoming wounded.

***

Rather than Apparating by stages, they had _flown_ to Australia, Muggle-style, Hermione and the distinguished specialist in Spell Damage, Boudicca Derwent. In their initial consult at St. Mungo's, Derwent had read her the riot act about attempting that memory charm unassisted—apparently in practice it's done by two spellcasters in tandem, for redundancy and safety—indeed, for attempting it at all. The nearest Muggle equivalent, she's learned, is advanced neurosurgery, of the kind done by teams of surgeons in ten-hour marathons.

She and Derwent undid the charm in tandem, since she was the original spellcaster, and it took seven hours over the course of an autumn evening in Australia; as they crossed midnight, the sweat broke out on her brow, and she had to remember to breathe, to relax while concentrating utterly…

When the final layer unwound, and her parents recognized her...

When Derwent did the last diagnostic spells to be sure that everything was in place…

After the initial tearful reunion, Derwent took her aside, cast _Muffliato_ and gave her a dressing-down that if possible matched the acerbity of the first one, with a full enumeration of everything that could have gone wrong, but hadn't.

_But hadn't_, Hermione repeated to herself silently, tears running down her face and her wand hand trembling uncontrollably, because now it _could,_ now that she didn't have to hold steady.

Once the roll call of counterfactual catastrophe had been read, Boudicca Derwent drew herself to her full height and offered Hermione an apprenticeship at St. Mungo's on the strength of what she'd just done, unassisted and out of books.

When Hermione protested that she didn't have her NEWTs, Derwent told her that the NEWTs would be pro forma in her case, as her conjecture as to correct procedure had in more than one point been an innovation. What wasn't written down, the actual tradecraft, was actually quite different from Hermione's guess. _Those_ are the places that could have led to disaster, and which Hermione bridged without realizing she was traversing the abyss.

Three days after their arrival at Heathrow, she's still giddy. And she just got a promotion at her computer programming job at the bank, too. And there's yet another offer, which she'll describe to her parents, eventually, as soon as there's a logical place for it in their colloquy, which has been running all night.

***

The Drs. Granger, it turns out, have a similar choice of blessings. Their dental practice in Australia is booming, and they love the seacoast town in which they are living. Elizabeth and William had entertained that fantasy for years, of chucking it all and running off to Australia together. When Hermione asked them where they'd prefer for sanctuary, her mother had said, "Australia. We could run off to Australia," and her father had started laughing, even though the situation was far from funny.

They could come back to England, as well. Elizabeth Granger confesses herself tempted, because the smell of those flowering trees, and the English spring; those mellow skies, and tea in the back garden at midsummer, all tempt irresistibly. Tonight reminds her of the idyllic early years, when Hermione was small… before everything became irrevocably complicated, when their most ambitious fantasy for their small daughter had been admission to Oxford or Cambridge.

Hermione's mother is just coming around to girl talk, now, asking her if she's still seeing the boy she was interested in at school. Not the nice Bulgarian one, of course; though Viktor was a perfect gentleman, Elizabeth had always had the sense that wasn't going to work out. No, she means the red-headed one whose parents they'd met.

No, Hermione tells her mother, she and Ron stopped seeing each other quite a while ago. It was pretty unpleasant going through the breakup, because the press got involved, but in the post-war relief work, they've crossed paths occasionally and it's better, and she's had some working contacts with Ron's father Arthur, who really is a good fellow.

"So," Elizabeth presses, "are you seeing anyone?"

"Yes, she says. You remember the couple I told you about, who were tortured?"

Elizabeth nods. "Alice and Frank Longbottom."

"I'm dating their son, Neville." She adds that this has led to yet another happy choice.

"He's proposed?"

"Oh, no. We're both too young to get married, and he's just started his apprenticeship. It was quite an honor, too, because he doesn't have his NEWTs yet. He's working with the war orphans at Hogwarts and studying Herbology. He'll be a Professor when Sprout retires."

She catches her breath, realizing that she's just given Neville's CV at a dead run, and that she sounds both stuffy and absurdly young.

"Once Mrs L realized my intentions were honorable, she offered me an apprenticeship. Whether or not I married into the family, but with incentives if I did: full partnership and half the income from the patents and the Floo powder concession. She's working on hybrid technology, and it's really quite exciting."

In the north, she says, it's really more the Statute of Discretion, and the Ministry of Magic is commonly referred to in the collective as "those spineless southern buggers." The resistance in Lancashire had used cell phones to communicate, and the movement was mixed Muggle-and-wizard both in personnel and in techniques. Neville's Gran had developed some techniques for using Muggle electronics and magical technology without one interfering with the other. Thaumaturgical shielding, she calls it.

Elizabeth smiles. "So that's how you were able to do all that wand-work to prepare dinner without worrying about your computers upstairs."

Hermione smiles. Her mother has always been distinguished by her ability to get it in one or less.

That's the point at which the doorbell rings.

"Who can that be?" her father says. "It's four o'clock in the morning."

Hermione does a quick check of the foe-glass, sighs, and goes to open the front door. In a pool of light, sharply distinguished from the surrounding spring darkness, Draco Malfoy is standing on the front step. This time he's wearing wizard's robes with a dressing gown thrown over them, and he's holding a bundle that can only be a baby.

"Granger," he says. "I saw the lights and thought you'd be up."

Hermione's father says to her, "Is there something you didn't tell us about what you did in the war?" She recognizes the tone as joking, and then realizes how it looks: there's a boy, holding a baby, standing in their doorway.

She sighs. "No, dad, it's his _sister._"

Draco says, "I was walking the baby, because Mother needed to sleep." He explains further: Hypatia is soothed by being walked, and she also likes the tube and the commuter trains. Frequently he Floos to the Leaky Cauldron and thence walks to King's Cross; if the walk doesn't calm her, then he looks for a train.

Which doesn't _really _explain why he's shown up once more on her doorstep at four o'clock in the morning, this time with his baby sister, but Hermione has long since stopped expecting Malfoy to make sense.


	8. Chapter 8

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

Draco had seen the lights on, and rather fewer layers of Muggle-repelling charms, and of course he should have known that meant something. Now he's standing on the front steps of the Granger house, picked out in the light over the front door, and feeling singularly exposed. His baby sister slumbers against his chest, a warm breathing weight. It took forever for her to settle this time; he'd paced the Manor, which she doesn't like for some reason; there's something in the air that she picks up, perhaps her mother's unhappiness and perhaps some uneasy presence from all that's happened there. Babies are notoriously sensitive to ghosts that no one else sees.

Since the coming of spring, he's been taking her outside, Apparating to the Leaky Cauldron, and walking thence to King's Cross. For some reason, she loves Muggle trains; as soon as the train is in motion, she snuggles against his chest and falls asleep. A discreet Glamour takes care of any potential Muggle annoyances, and he never goes out without his wand, in any case.

Tonight, halfway to the commuter suburbs, he remembered … Granger. He was curious as to the use she'd made of the elf-made wine, which she'd mentioned in passing to him had checked out clean with Slughorn.

He knows that meant the most comprehensive assay known to wizardkind, because Slughorn dislikes him with a cold and immovable passion, dating not only from sixth year but from three generations of Malfoys before him: his father Lucius and grandfather Abraxas, whom Slughorn taught at Hogwarts, and his great-grandfather Apollonius Paracelsus, who was his schoolmate.

For his own part, he can't look at Slughorn without remembering the agony of sixth-year Potions, constantly worrying about being caught at his thefts of Polyjuice and the desperate business in the Room of Requirement, and half-hoping that he would be, if Dumbledore and his forces were in fact as all-powerful as they cracked on… well, that hadn't worked out so well, had it?

In any case, he prefers not to think about Horace Slughorn if he can help it.

He's standing there, caught in the full glare of electric light, and who's staring at him is the Granger parents. The Muggle parents of the Muggle-born… her mother, whose sharp dark eyes would suggest a Legilimens of no small attainment, if she were a witch; and her father, whose unruly mane of curly hair and steel-rimmed spectacles make him look like a lion—a swotty sort of lion, the Gryffindor coat of arms come to rumpled, Mugglish life.

Her mother gives him a long, considering glance that solves for him in a split-second the puzzle of Granger's compulsively law-abiding ways. "I believe we've met," she says. "I'm Elizabeth Granger, and you are Draco Malfoy. We met you… some years ago. Diagon Alley. With your father." This last in a tone that makes it quite clear that she knows exactly who, and what, Lucius Malfoy is.

He nods, shifting baby Hypatia in his arms so that his wand hand is free to make a reach if he needs to defend her.

To his surprise, Elizabeth Granger extends her hand. He stares at it for long moment, until he realizes that he's looking at a proffered handshake.

Gingerly, he takes the hand, and shakes it. The grip is firm but not crushing, a Healer's handshake, that reassures you that you will be looked after capably.

Some sort of Muggle Healers, they are, he recalls…

"I believe your efforts gave Hermione opportunity for some magical orthodontia," Elizabeth Granger says dryly. It's an even longer pause before he realizes that she's referring to his hex that grew Granger's teeth to grotesque length. He's seriously discomfited by this, and tries to settle his face into a neutral expression.

Granger's father turns to his daughter and says, "Well, are you going to invite him in?"

Granger looks annoyed, and then says, "Come on in, Malfoy. We were just getting ready to have breakfast."

***

It's singularly awkward, not least because it's the first time he's ever broken bread with Muggles, and they're making polite small talk, and asking after his baby sister: her name, her age, what sort of difficulty he has in settling her to sleep, her mother's health.

Halfway through the meal, she shifts on his shoulder, yawns, and looks at him with a momentary expression of solemn cogitation, which tells him that shortly he'll have an unpleasant task to attend to….

… which he can't, of course, since she's forbidden wand-work. So he'll have to withdraw to the garden, or some other location, to change the baby's nappies…

Granger's mother smiles at him knowingly, and offers the use of the table in the other room. He frowns and shifts uncomfortably, not sure…

"Oh it's perfectly all right, Malfoy," Granger says. "Neville's Gran showed me how to see to that awkwardness with the electronics."

Much to his discomfort, they insist on following him to the table, where he lays the baby out on her blanket, and undoes the nappies so he can Vanish the mess…

"Well, _that's_ convenient," Elizabeth Granger says, with mild interest. "So, where does it go?"

He frowns and shrugs. "Wherever Vanished objects go, I suppose."

Her husband says, "I wish we'd had a baby-minder from your side of the border," and then Draco senses, from the quelling expression on Granger's face, that her father is about to tell some embarrassing anecdote of her babyhood.

Which he doesn't. Instead he says, "We've been contemplating how to partake of your mother's housewarming gift." He looks to see the bottle standing on the sideboard, darkly gleaming.

"Granger, you _cleaned_ it," he says with some pique.

Elizabeth Granger cuts in. "No, young man, I did. It was simply filthy."

"The cobwebs are _honorific_," he says, irritated (irrationally he knows) that she doesn't understand the nuances. "Otherwise it could be some third-rate vintage bottled forty years ago."

"Harvest of 1789," Granger says, "and we know it, so I don't understand why we have to _prove_ it."

Her mother says, "And I don't fancy _spiders_ creeping about while I'm having a sip of wine. So would your mother be partial to a nice little dinner with us? We're inviting Hermione's young man and his grandmother, as well. We couldn't possibly drink that all by ourselves."

He has to allow that the bottle is imposingly large, but no doubt Mother was thinking of her own entertaining at the Manor. He's not sure if he should accept the invitation on her behalf, lest the tricky subject arise of _return hospitality_. From the look on Granger's face, she's contemplating the same prospect.

"We could dine alfresco, in the back garden," her father says. "Hermione tells me that your family has a stately home in Wiltshire, and your mother is quite a gardener."

"Though I wouldn't fancy trying to keep a flower garden with _peacocks_ strutting about," her mother says. "They'll eat all sorts of things."

It had been a running argument between his mother and father, the only one he remembers in his earshot. No doubt it stood in for other things, but unexpectedly it brings tears to his eyes, for he hears his father's voice saying, "Narcissa, the peacocks are _traditional_, and I won't have you hexing them just because they eat your roses."

He does up the baby's clothes and wraps her once more in her light blanket, which distracts, he hopes, as he discreetly wipes his eyes on his sleeve.

So, unexpectedly, he meets the dawn sitting at breakfast with the Drs. Granger and their daughter, as they pass the baby around and fuss over her, and say how much she looks like her brother. Unspoken is their approbation of him as an affectionate brother and foster-father, for he's quite sure that they know his whole story.

It's unclear, though, how he's going to extend the invitation to his mother—who would be at once pleased at the belated acceptance of her gift, and perhaps discomfited at the notion of dining with Muggles.

***


	9. Chapter 9

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

Mary Esmond didn't even look up at first until she heard the silence in the waiting room. She'd been talking with McConnell, in a break between waves of patients; the usual suspects were all in and waiting, reading their magazines or talking quietly or playing chess.

She'd been showing McConnell pictures of Jackie. Some of them were glossy black and white stage documentation shots from Jackie's portfolio: Jackie Bones in school, in student productions of the classics: Jackie as a much-too-young Lady Macbeth, Jackie as Hedda Gabler. Her personal favorite, and McConnell's as well: Jackie as Joan of Arc, Shaw's Saint Joan. Mary loved that part, because Joan was really very much like Jackie, a sensible, humorous country girl. Well, no, Jackie was definitely a city girl, a Londoner, but other than that…

McConnell nods, and smiles with something odd and wistful in her expression. Mary knows that McConnell lost her mother and sister and brother and her best friend in the late war, the war about which she knows nothing.

And Jackie Bones is dead too.

She's taking out the color pictures, the snapshots from home, Jackie with her eccentric Aunt Amelia's cranky white Persian, Darius, showcased on her lap as if she were merely his throne; Jackie on the Thames embankment in front of the Houses of Parliament—that was the day they played at being tourists, with Jackie putting on a stagy and nasal New York accent—pure Bronx, she had said—

A dead silence falls.

Mary looks up.

It's the Rock Star, and his redheaded girlfriend, and he's got a baby, no a toddler, perched on his skinny blue-jeaned hip. Everyone in the waiting room has looked up and fallen silent. The Black Widow looks up and puts her hand to her mouth and if possible goes paler than she already is. More than one face in the room turns to her and glares.

And then the oddest thing happens—it's like a film effect, only in real life—the little boy's hair turns blue. No, it's not digital technology or special effects because this is real life and real life does not have special effects…

Gas-blue, the color flaring through his hair as if it really were made of fire, and his eyes go yellow, an extraordinary shade like the eyes of a cat.

Mary turns to McConnell, who whispers, "Teddy Lupin."

McConnell adds, as if this were explanation, that it's _her_ son. Her dead friend's son.

Mary has seen many strange things in her life; she's learned to keep quiet, because explanations arrive more quickly that way.

McConnell says, "He's the godfather, you know." The Rock Star, the unprepossessing boy not quite twenty years old, whose very ordinary name she can never remember, until she recites to herself the short list of ordinary names—Granger, Potter, Thomas, Finnegan—the four names on the list that are ordinary to the point of invisibility. Granger is the officer, Thomas is the artist, Finnegan is the wisecracking Irishman, and Potter is the Rock Star.

Potter and his girlfriend seat themselves, and the little boy, released from his godfather's arms, toddles about the waiting room, looking at the faces, many of whom seem to be familiar to him. The Black Widow looks on, with an unreadable expression, which would read as calmly neutral interest except that her long fingers are twisting about themselves in her black-draped lap.

McConnell had laughed at that nickname, by the way, because the Widow's maiden name actually was Black. She'd started reciting a list of names, surpassingly odd all of them: Andromeda, Bellatrix, Sirius, Regulus. All of them named after constellations. Ah, well, the ill-named son fits in there, though Mary still can't help parsing it as 'double-dealing reptile.'

McConnell laughs at her now, too. "You're goggling," she says.

"Blue hair," Mary whispers. "His hair turned blue. And his eyes…"

McConnell shrugs. "Well, his mother was a shape-shifter and his father was a werewolf, so that's nothing surprising."

Mary isn't quite sure she heard that right. She looks at McConnell, who stares levelly back. "You're joking."

"No," McConnell says. "Why do you think Kingsley put you all under Fidelius?"

_You cannot speak. You must keep faith._ That was the translation of the words from that little ceremony, the one that had struck her so odd at the first orientation.

"You must keep faith," McConnell says. "So it rather takes the pressure off us. We don't have to worry so much about slipping."

"There's no such thing as werewolves," Mary says sensibly.

McConnell takes a picture out of her pocket. It's another of those marvels that move, and it's the pink-haired girl again, except this time she's with a man, sandy-haired and some years older than herself, no, she looks more closely, many years older than her, for the girl is in her mid-twenties at most and her companion must be closer to forty, and he has a look Mary well recognizes: those eyes have stared into the abyss.

"Remus John Lupin, werewolf," McConnell says. "And war hero. Posthumous Order of Merlin, Second Class. So's Tonks." She blinks, and Mary notices that her brown eyes are bright with tears. "It sounds bloody glamorous but they're _dead._"

Mary is well acquainted with all of the British military decorations and there is no Order of Merlin.

No, McConnell tells her, it's on their side of the border, and then, as if she had said too much, she takes up the black and white glossy of Jackie Bones as Saint Joan. Mary watches that unreadable face, and there's a flicker about the eyes….

Addie McConnell _knows_ Jackie Bones; those pictures are not the first time she's seen that face.

_You cannot speak. You must keep faith._

"You know Jackie Bones," Mary says, trying not to sound accusing, because this woman has been friendly to her, has accepted her invitation to dinner and a show even though technically it's fraternization. "Jackie Bones is dead, and you knew her _before._" McConnell's fingers close on that slim wooden rod that they all seem to carry, in a pocket or a sleeve or a boot.

She flicks it ever so slightly, and her lips barely move; all that Mary hears is a sussurus of consonants…

Something shifts, and suddenly the face across from her snaps into focus.

"I remember you," Mary says. "You were at her Aunt Amelia's. We met you once at the National Gallery. You were following us."

"Strictly in the line of duty, I'm afraid," McConnell says. "I was Jackie's bodyguard." She says, "They never would have assigned me that duty if they'd known what was going to happen to Madam Bones. It was a prestige assignment, a plum for a new graduate." McConnell's face stiffens momentarily and her gaze shifts to the middle distance, to the place where _it_ is still going on, where _it _will go on forever. Mary's seen that look before, on wave after wave of veterans who can't and don't say what _it_ is, at least not to the one who watches the waiting room.

"The head of Dimly's Squib niece—nothing difficult about that at all. Until they took out the head of Dimly."

The words don't mean anything, but the tone translates: _It was my first assignment. I wasn't ready for it. They killed her in front of my eyes and I didn't move fast enough to stop them._

She looks at Mary. "And _you_ were there. You were the first Muggle I ever Obliviated."

***

**Author's note:** "Until they took out the head of Dimly." Amelia Susan Bones, d. 1996, Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement; see opening chapter of _Half-blood Prince._


	10. Chapter 10

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

"So you made me forget."

Mary Esmond is calm, which is professional training, of course. With the tiniest spurt of adrenalin, those reactions engage smoothly, the whole machinery of the _trained rational response _comes to bear on what would otherwise be a roiling mess of anger and betrayed trust and … whatever it is she's come to feel for this girl, that's led to the dinner invitation and the suggestion that they see the _Comedy of Errors _at Shakespeare's Globe.

McConnell nods, and for the first time Mary really sees that face. It's the face of a woman ten years her junior, a young soldier by all accounts, who's lived with her own for so long that they have a nickname for civilians: _Muggles,_ she calls them.

Mary has learned to read the flickers of emotion on professionally stoic faces; Jackie told her she'd have made an admirable poker player. She reads that McConnell is sorry that she said anything, and worried that it will wreck things, and thinking out the implications of what she's just told. Of course, if she's telling the truth, it's not as if Mary will be able to tell anyone else. But like so many of the others who've passed through this clinic, McConnell operates on a _need to know _basis.

"So how did you do it?" That's probably Most Secret, but Mary's curious anyway.

"This." McConnell taps two fingers against the handle of her conductor's baton, or whatever that wooden stick is.

There's a delighted squawk from the waiting room, and Mary looks up to see the little boy with the blue hair—the evident source of the noise—who's kneeling up on the seat next to the Black Widow and has hold of her long shining hair, and is pulling it toward him, as she winces.

There's a terrible hush in the room, which Mary recognizes as the silence in which a crowd awaits the response of a dangerous person. From the glances she's intercepted, it's plain that the Black Widow is regarded as dangerous.

The Widow closes one hand over his fat little fists—yes, so he won't pull further. Then she gently pries loose one little finger after another, while saying, "No, dear. Not a toy." He smiles at her hopefully, because everyone thus far has responded to his charm, and then his hair shifts from blue to moonlight-pale—just like hers—and his eyes from wolf-amber to calm sea-blue.

As other babies imitate their elders' facial expressions, this one imitates their faces.

Compared to McConnell's professional stoicism, the genteel reserve of the Black Widow is transparency itself; she smiles in a slight, wistful way as she disentangles both tiny hands from her hair. "Sit now," she says. "Good little boys don't pull on their auntie's hair."

There's a soft, barely audible sigh, a collective exhalation of relief. Potter has crossed the space between them and is poised to scoop the boy up, when the Widow shakes her head. Her hand is absently stroking the little blond head next to her, and the little boy must have rearranged his features quite a bit, for he now looks as if he could be her son. "Let him sit here a bit; he'll be off somewhere else soon enough."

That with the knowing, complicit smile of one parent to another.

That's the moment when her son comes in, carrying the baby, the usual satchel of baby things over his shoulder. (Mary has only ever seen him take toys out of it, quite marvelous toys that move under their own power, and she wonders if he has a stash of spare nappies somewhere else.) His glance shifts from his mother to Potter and back, and thence to the toddler sitting next to her. He frowns.

"Your cousin Nymphadora's son," the Widow says.

McConnell rolls her eyes, which makes her look even younger. "Great Merlin, Tonks told her mother _not_ to call her that."

Mary can't help but agree that Nymphadora is probably the most dreadful name she's yet heard, and she can't but feel for the poor girl, for the teasing at school.

"Her da called her Dora, but her mother wouldn't go along. And it does appear the sisters Black are sticking together," McConnell says, then with a sort of frown adds, "Just a different pair this time." She doesn't explain further, nor does she break eye contact—even though Mary has the sense she's keeping the situation in the waiting room in her peripheral vision.

"You made me forget. With _that._ But you didn't say how." McConnell's forefinger and thumb make tiny, tiny strokes on the polished wood of the baton; otherwise she's utterly still, very clearly waiting to see what's going to happen.

The Widow's son is sitting next to little Teddy, who's reaching for his baby cousin as if she were a particularly interesting toy.

"Gently," his godfather admonishes from across the aisle.

With the elaborate care of a not-quite-two-year-old, Teddy touches the fine blond hair on the baby's head; she looks up from her brother's shoulder and tries an expression that's more or less a smile. The Widow smiles indulgently.

Her son shifts the baby on his shoulder, then asks her something about a dinner invitation. "It's awkward, of course," he says.

McConnell says, "If you'd rather I didn't come to dinner…"

Mary says, "I want to know how you did that, and why."

McConnell sighs. "The same reason, really. Magic." Mary would suspect her of flippancy, except the expression is too serious. She says, "You shouldn't have seen that. I wish I hadn't seen it."

"So if you wanted, could you give me back the memory?"

McConnell says, "Not me. But there are people who could." Her expression shifts, becomes intent; her eyes darken. "If you really wanted, they could. Derwent's the best. If you wanted…" Her mouth compresses. "But if I were you, I wouldn't." She indicates the closed door to the office of Dr. Rosencrantz. "It would put you on the other side of that door. Be glad you don't remember."

Mary says, "Magic. So explain. Lots of things look like magic, before you explain them."

"Magic. Just as I said." She shrugs. "You still talk about it, on this side of the border. Witches. Wizards. Magical people. Fairytales, except it's not. Oh, and fairies are real too."

Mary looks skeptically at McConnell, with her sensible bobbed brown hair and ordinary face and black T-shirt with the discreet scarlet letters DMLE on the sleeve, black trousers and black boots. She looks quite modern and trained; quite plainly she's an _operative_, like the others she's seen.

And the way that she's fingering that baton, discreetly but never losing contact, is the way that trained operatives keep track of their weapons.

The door to the waiting room opens, and Granger enters, with Longbottom a single pace behind her; Mary sees him relinquish her hand, as if they're making the transition from couple to colleagues on the very threshold.

Granger sees Potter and her face lights up the way you do when you see family; he smiles in return and silently indicates the tableau with Teddy and his two cousins and his great-aunt. The Widow looks up as well, makes full eye contact with Granger, and gives a single, magisterial nod. There's something archaic and regal about that gesture; Mary thinks that's what _royal permission_ might have looked like, in the days when kings and queens were the viceroys of God.

"Then we'll expect you Sunday afternoon," Granger says in her usual brisk, sensible tones.

She and the Widow's son exchange a glance that's conspiratorial and relieved in equal measure, before she and Longbottom take up their usual stations.

Mary says, "I invited you to dinner, and the invitation stands." She says, "I think I might understand why your people are sensitive about fraternization."

McConnell's posture relaxes a little. "It's a long story. We hear a lot of cautionary tales, let's say."

Mary smiles. "Then you can tell me some of them over dinner." She says, "You haven't seen Shakespeare, have you?"

No, McConnell hasn't. Her dead friend's favorite band was the Weird Sisters, some of whom came from this side of the border. That's where she's heard of Shakespeare.

"The Scottish play. But there's so much more."

McConnell nods. "There's quite a lot, you know, on this side of the border." She nods toward the doctor's closed door. "Maybe I should come in here, next wave."

***

**Author's note:** "The Scottish play." _Macbeth, _of course, thus designated by theatrical superstition given its ill-omened reputation.


	11. Chapter 11

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

***

It's Sunday afternoon, and the weather is perfect, with a smiling blue sky and green-gold light flickering in the foliage of the Grangers' back garden. The kitchen is full of the lovely smells of olive oil, rosemary and garlic. Hermione's parents are both at work on the meal, and life seems to have returned to the idyllic days before the war.

Except now she's an adult, and permitted to do magic, and so …

"That's the fourth time you've Transfigured the china," Hermione's mother says, shooing her daughter out of the kitchen. "Neville, will you distract her, please?"

Hermione knows that her mother is right (she's only underfoot) but this doesn't allay the up-rush of anxiety at the thought that in less than half an hour, _Narcissa Malfoy_ will be seated in her parents' back garden, as if she were an ordinary guest.

Luckily, Neville is actually quite good at distracting her. He puts an arm around her and they go to sit in the back garden. Earlier in the morning, he and Hermione had put up the marquee, a miniature version of the sort that Bill and Fleur had at their wedding. Narcissa and Draco are both quite fair-skinned, and while high noon in the London suburbs doesn't have the intensity of the sunlight in her parents' other home on the Australian coast, she's not sure that she's ever seen either of them abroad in full daylight.

For someone once renowned for the faultiness of his memory, Neville has a remarkable collection of stories, which balance on the cusp between history, genealogy and gossip, and he knows that Hermione loves nothing so much as to learn something new. At the moment, he's telling her about his friend Andrew's fiancée Miranda, whom he knew before they were introduced.

The pretense was necessary, of course, not so much because Andrew is a Muggle, as because of the nature of the connection. Miranda is actually his cousin.

Hermione is more than successfully distracted from her worry about Narcissa's imminent arrival (which she recognizes as an odd amalgam of post-traumatic stress and class anxiety). "I thought Miranda was a Muggle."

"Well, by some lights she is; I mean she's mostly Muggle." He frowns. "Except her grandmother was no witch, so Eugene must have been a Squib rather than a plain Muggle." He frowns. "Or maybe he was a wizard. Gran thinks he may have been kin to Anthony Goldstein; she says Anthony is the dead spit of him."

"I thought that Anthony was Muggle-born."

Neville smiles. "So did he." It's all more complicated than that, of course; everything in the wizarding world turns out that way. He doesn't know all that much about Eugene, of course, because he died in 1919 and never even knew that he was the father of Miranda's grandmother; it definitely wasn't a marriage but an _episode._ Nonetheless the ancient keepsake photo of Eugene has pride of place on Augusta Longbottom's mantelpiece, right next to the wizarding photograph of Frank Longbottom Sr., and the family picture of the other Frank, her first husband, and the child they lost to the Spanish flu.

The breeze is sweet and the sunlight flickers on her closed eyelids; it doesn't hurt that Neville is stroking her hair, and then (unfairly but oh so pleasantly) closing his warm hand on the back of her neck. "You know I can't resist your family sagas," she says.

He kisses the top of her head. "Gran wouldn't approve of me telling," he says, "except you're family already, or near enough…"

Actually, it would be disturbing if she didn't trust him, how well he distracts her. "Neville," she says.

He grazes her cheek with his, very like Crookshanks.

"You're actually doing quite a good job of distracting me."

"But you're worrying again," he says, kissing her. "They'll be here shortly, and then it will be just a garden party." She leans into his warmth, and he adds, "Though I never thought it would be your parents having the Malfoys to dinner."

"And your Gran," she says.

"That's another matter," he says. "I didn't think I would be that lucky."

***

Neville is right; the time passes without notice, as they talk about the people they know from Hogwarts, about Ginny Weasley's successful tryout with the Holyhead Harpies—the scandal of the year, since her parents (which is to say her mother) were expecting her to finish Hogwarts in due course--well, things are in disorder of late, which is what Ginny had said to them by way of explanation.

Hermione would have been scandalized by that, once upon a time—imagine, Ginny leaving her NEWTs in doubt!—but now that things are in disorder generally, and the NEWTs are in doubt for everyone in her year and earlier… She startles at the _crack_ of Apparition and a surprised half-cry of surprise from inside the house. Her father emerges to say, "They're here."

Indeed they are: Narcissa Malfoy is standing in the kitchen, just relinquishing her son's arm; he's brought her directly to the Grangers' kitchen by side-along Apparition, discourteous though that is, because it's broad daylight and there's the Statute of Secrecy to consider. And, Hermione realizes, he knows the kitchen well enough to manage direct Apparition there.

Her father is already taking Narcissa's cloak and asking if her trip was pleasant—a silly question, of course, because Apparition is _never_ pleasant, but Narcissa is smiling her regal social smile and replying that it went as well as can be expected.

Hypatia is fussing; Draco explains that she's just wakened from her afternoon nap, and Apparition doesn't agree with her. She confirms that by spitting up all over his dress robes and the satchel of baby things. He flicks his wand, discreetly Vanishing the mess, and Hermione takes care of the bit that landed on the floor.

The doorbell rings, and Hermione's mother goes to answer it, and comes back accompanied by Augusta Longbottom, arrayed in her green dress, vulture hat, and carrying her red handbag. _She_ came out on the commuter train like a proper visitor to the London suburbs.

Now the kitchen is far too full of people; Hermione's mother shoos them out to the garden, to sit under the marquee and admire the garden while she finishes the last of the preparations on dinner.

Narcissa remarks on the beauty and vigor of the rose bushes, which immediately engages Hermione's father, as those are his particular enthusiasm.

Behind her back, Draco mouths, "And no peacocks," which makes Hermione stifle a giggle. He's holding Hypatia in his lap, somewhat awkwardly, as he fishes with one hand in the satchel for a toy… _Accio_ being quite out of the question in full view of the neighbors.

Of course, the toy in question is scarcely more discreet: a wonderful fluttering iridescent thing, at the sight of which Hypatia squeals in delight. It's a fantastical iridescent sort of rippling sheet, that floats through the air like a ray through tropical seas; it turns in on itself and folds, until the shape of a phoenix coalesces out of the glittering elaboration of surfaces.

Hypatia looks at it with a shiny fascinated gaze and waves her hands in delight.

Hermione doesn't remember her own baby toys, long since passed on to cousins or to children of her parents' friends, but they must have been a great deal duller than this, no doubt scientific and educational… well, in the wizarding world, this toy is the correspondent, as it shows creatures known to exist. Now the phoenix dissolves into a tangle of abstract folds and a dragon takes shape ….

Draco says that this is one of his own baby toys.

Narcissa looks over her shoulder at them, from her tour of the rose garden, and smiles indulgently.

Hermione wonders if it's Narcissa or Draco who takes the most care of the baby, who is currently nestled in her brother's arms as he guides the iridescent soap-bubble toy just out of range of her chubby little fingers.

Unbidden, she remembers that this doting brother, taking such tender attention of his baby sister, is the son for whom Narcissa was willing to betray their Dark Lord… and for whom she was willing to sell out his schoolmates—herself, Harry, Ron…

But she won't think about that, because it's the post-war. She won't think about that, because Neville's warmth next to her reminds her that she's safe. She won't think about that, because her father is telling Narcissa about the Australian flora in the garden of their other home, and Narcissa is responding with questions that show a true gardener's delight in the exotica of the Antipodes.

Augusta Longbottom is telling Elizabeth Granger how very much she's admired Hermione's character, ever since she was a wee slip of a thing and helping Neville to find his lost toad on the Hogwarts Express. She's no less proud of her grandson for ignoring all the fuss about his war-hero status. They've both been a great help in the post-war, and (she lowers her voice here) quite generous to those on both sides.

Neville's attention is suddenly absorbed by something in the grass; Draco turns pink and waves his wand to make the iridescent dragon fly in loops around baby Hypatia, who shrieks in delight. Hermione pretends that she didn't notice anything.

Narcissa is saying that she has quite a challenge with her roses, because of the peacocks that have the run of the estate and can't be interfered with because they're traditional. Her husband's family keeps them, she says.

Hermione's father nods sagely, with a humorous expression about his mouth; it's plain he's thinking of the judicious silences that contribute to a successful marriage.

And then it's time to eat, which comes as a great relief to all concerned.

***

**Author's notes:** As in the _Amends_ universe, my back-story for Neville's Gran is borrowed from the fan-fiction writer A. J. Hall (_Lust over Pendle, Dissipation and Despair_). Gran's 'episode' with Eugene is her invention; Miranda is also the name of Eugene's daughter (the grandmother of Andrew's fiancée). Andrew belongs to Silver Sailor Ganymede, from her fic _Explanations _(ch 6, Neville Longbottom).


	12. Chapter 12

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

* * *

The summer air, under the shade of the marquee, caresses his face like silk, and his little sister rests in the crook of his left arm, curled against his heart, her tiny ribcage rising and falling against his, her sweet warm weight supported by the forearm that bears a not-quite-faded Mark of ill omen.

Draco has always been a bit of a sensualist, without quite admitting it, and the lessons of the good Dr. Burgess—to stay in the present, to root himself in the specificity of what is happening _right now_—have rather extended his list of pleasures. Funny, that in the austere post-war, he should have had so much more enjoyment than in the days of glory of the House of Malfoy.

He's aware of the texture of his clothes, the silk tunic and under-robe and the cotton outer layer, in a deep green like the shifting light deep in a summer forest. In his right hand, there's the cool weight of a crystal wine glass—for the Grangers have taken out their best stemware, as befits a two-hundred-year-old vintage of elf-made wine.

Under cover of the tablecloth and the folds of his formal robes, he slowly slides his feet in and out of his shoes—his favorite green Turkish slippers, stitched with silver—letting the silk lining caress them.

His mother, who is the most beautiful woman in the world, sits across from him, sipping her wine and conversing with Granger's father. Unexpectedly, quite unexpectedly, they have continued their passionate conversation about rose gardening, and Mr. Granger has already promised her some cuttings as well as copies of some articles that might interest her, and she has reciprocated with an invitation to tour the Manor grounds.

If Mr. Granger accepts that invitation, he'll be the first Muggle in five hundred years to make such a visit and walk out alive.

Hermione Granger, who is decidedly _not_ the most beautiful woman in the world, sits next to the round-faced boy, no, the young man, who is almost certainly her fiancé, even if it's not official yet, and holds his hand under the table. Draco is amused at this; the folds of the tablecloth would hide their joined hands if Longbottom weren't so clumsily beaming at her, but Granger and Longbottom don't really care about hiding it. The expressions on the faces of Granger's mother and Longbottom's grandmother are covertly amused.

He remembers, as if it were in another life, that he once said unforgivable things to Neville Longbottom, taunting him about his insane parents. He remembers, as if it were last week (which it was) that he apologized for it, feeling quite raw because after all, Longbottom could have paid him out—Draco's father is in Azkaban—but never has spoken a word about it. Quite the contrary: on their first visit to the offices of Drs. Rosencrantz and Burgess, Neville greeted Draco's mother with the ancient courtesies befitting a witch of her rank, and the solemnity befitting her deep losses.

Longbottom had accepted the apology gravely, and had been the first to extend a handshake.

Then he had said what should have insulted Draco but oddly did not, because of the utter calm with which he said it: "You were a child."

What he didn't add, for it didn't need saying: _and I know that you are rather different, now that you have a child of your own._

When Hypatia begins to talk, there's no doubt that she'll mistake her brother for her father. He doesn't know if it would be the better part to leave that mistake uncorrected until she's rather older, at least so she won't feel the loss too early. And given his family's disgrace, it's likely the only way he will be anyone's father.

He has to admit, after all these years, that Potter was right: Neville Longbottom is worth twelve of him. He's been working on making up the debt; perhaps the exchange rate might drop to eight?

The bouquet of the wine—shifting and changeable, almond and frankincense, citrus and rose, an unnameable freshness like dawn on the moors—reminds him that he's alive, and in company. Mrs. Granger looks at him from across the table; she does have witch's eyes. It's hard to believe that she's not a witch, that Hermione Granger sprang full-blown from a long line of thorough Muggles. Pureblood Muggles, as it were … what a funny thought.

Mrs. Granger smiles at him, and at least half of the smile is in her eyes, as if she really could see his thought, and agreed that it was amusing.

He smiles back, and raises his glass slightly before taking another sip. "To your delightful hospitality, Madam Granger," he says.

She acknowledges the compliment and asks him if he would like more of the bouillabaisse.

He accepts another serving, with a compliment to the perfection with which it has been prepared. She says that it is the freshness of the ingredients, and of course attention.

When he was a child, he scorned this sort of small talk, and now he realizes that it can be completely sincere, this ritual accord on the beautiful and the true: scallops in olive oil and rosemary, roses bred for burgeoning glory, a small and well-loved baby girl.

With her witch's eyes and her intelligent smile, Mrs. Granger is actually a very attractive woman, much in the style of her daughter… In that smile is a flashing glimpse of a possible world he never had considered, in which he might have recognized the peculiar attractiveness of Hermione Granger. In another world, had he not been so keen on being Lucius Malfoy's son, had he not been born into an unfinished war, had that war and its instigator not risen from the dead to haunt another generation. That possible world lies completely out of his reach, because he can imagine no sequence of events in _his_ world that would have ended with him sitting in Longbottom's place next to her.

And if Neville Longbottom is worth twelve of him, he doesn't want to think about what his fiancée weighs in that measure. After all, their current association had begun with him reproaching her—with a drawn wand—for his sleepless nights, and she had put her mind to solving that problem as if he were the same as the people on her own side, as if his people hadn't tried to kill her.

And thanks to the Muggle doctor's sensible ministrations, he sleeps very well these days—as well as the foster-father of a baby girl can sleep—with midsummer approaching and a sweet breeze stirring the curtains of his childhood room. It occurs to him that when he's in the room with Dr. Burgess, he doesn't think of him as a Muggle, but a Presence.

Something warm and silky slides past his shins; he looks down to see Granger's great beast of a cat rubbing back and forth along his green robes, before looking up at him with its lantern eyes, and moving on to mark the next guest.


	13. Chapter 13

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Mary Esmond has always loved the tourist attractions; when she and Jackie first walked along the Thames embankment, Mary had regaled her with the story of Monet coming to London to paint the fogs, and feeling aggrieved at the unexpectedly clear weather.

Of course, that opalescent mist was coal smoke and similar poisonous effluvia, but it was quite beautiful, Mary added by way of footnote. At least if one can judge by the paintings…

Jackie had asked, "So are you a painter?" with that wide-eyed look: wide-set dark eyes, she had, and dark hair that the sun struck into burnished copper.

She told Jackie that she read, and liked to think about the connections between things.

But Jackie Bones is dead.

That knowledge still nestles under her ribs, even under the bright blue sky over Shakespeare's Globe, even as she and Addie McConnell crowd in with the other groundlings, laughing at the mistaken identities, at the plot twists, even as the crowd jostles them together and McConnell—Addie—doesn't move away. It's companionable, pleasant, standing shoulder to shoulder.

Only afterward does Addie say how very numerous are the Londoners, and the visitors; along the embankment, it's the crowds she watches, far less than the famous architecture or even the river.

"So how many are there, where you live?" Mary asks, feeling awkward about the phrasing, and intrusive about the question.

Addie is evasive, just as Mary knew she would be. "Not as many as on your side of the border," she says. "We're rare, you know." That with a strange not-quite-a-smile.

On the bus, on the tube, Addie looks at everything: the adverts overhead, the gleaming doors, the other passengers, the streets or darkness sliding by the glass windows.

It isn't until they reach Mary's flat that she begins to feel awkward. It's nondescript to the point of vanishing: a place for sleeping, and eating, but most of all for reading; there are the shelves of books, and then there are the pictures. A poster or two on the wall, from student productions in New York, small theater companies or experimental reading groups that appeared like bubbles in the froth of that great city and then vanished again, leaving in their wake only these evanescent bits of paper, and somewhere on each of them, the name: Jackie Bones.

Addie investigates the flat discreetly, looking without looking as if she's looking, like a cat. She doesn't pick things up and look at them; she doesn't touch anything except with her eyes. Her soundless tread and comprehensive glance remind Mary once more that this is a _professional._

That makes it awkward all over again, for she can't forget what she's learned: this was Jackie's bodyguard, who failed in her task.

ooo

Just before the weekend, it had been too warm in the waiting room; there'd been something amiss with the ventilation. Mary noticed for the first time that everyone was wearing short sleeves; even the Widow, all in floor-length black as she was, was wearing something with flowing slashed sleeves that left her exquisite alabaster arms bare halfway to the shoulder behind panels of black lace.

Everyone, that is, except the Widow's son, who wore his customary black pleated trousers and white dress shirt, the cuffs fastened with onyx cufflinks. The baby was sleeping in her improvised bassinet on the seat next to him, and he was leaning back watching her.

It was summer now, high summer, but the boy was still dressed for winter; his only concession to the weather had been to leave the jumper at home. He was not comfortable in those clothes; she could see the minute beads of perspiration on his forehead and upper lip, but no change in his expression.

It's the little hints that tell you when someone has been under military discipline. A civilian wouldn't have sat quite so motionless.

She'd looked up and seen that McConnell was watching him, and there was ice in her expression, as had been in her voice when she spoke of the Widow's husband, "A bad lot. He won't be seeing daylight these twenty years, if he survives it." McConnell's glance rested on the onyx cufflinks, and her lips twitched faintly in an expression of contempt.

At first, all she would say was that he'd never be rid of it, and everyone knew what was under those sleeves, so why pretend?

ooo

Mary stands in the middle of her front room, that had seemed quite adequate before, more than adequate, with the light pouring in: a summer day, a perfect summer day that someone had trotted out for the tourists and the theater-goers, the lovers and the mothers of small children. McConnell—or is she Addie?—is looking at the books, discreetly, and as discreetly keeping her in peripheral vision.

She has that plummeting feeling, that's like missing a step while descending the staircase… only in this case it's the floor, and the ground beneath it, that's missing. Jackie is missing. Jackie is gone. Nothing will make that up. And if she'd been allowed to feel that, three years ago when it happened…

… except that she had not remembered. She still doesn't remember, not the real part, the part that Addie assures her she doesn't want to know.

She does remember the killers' emblem, now that McConnell has shown it to her. Has had someone show it to her…

ooo

Mary frowned curiously at the boy sitting in the plastic chair, with his impeccable posture and his expressionless face, except when he glanced at his baby sister and a flutter of tenderness, like an Alpine sunrise, would soften the sharpness of his features. The only thing she could think he would be hiding with his long sleeves was the track marks of the addict, and his thinness seemed natural, not drug-induced.

McConnell's fingers closed on her wand (for now Mary knew that's what it was) and she said, in a low but commanding voice, "You. Young Malfoy."

The boy looked up.

"To the desk."

He obeyed with such alacrity that Mary was now _quite_ sure that he had been a soldier.

McConnell said, "Show her the Mark." He compressed his mouth and stared back with those very pale eyes: defiance, and something else.

"Go on, show her. You were pleased enough to show it before." Again, that silent duel of glances; he wouldn't say no, but he was letting his eyes say it for him.

McConnell's voice dropped so low that Mary could barely hear it. "Unbutton your sleeve, Malfoy, or I will do it for you." He flinched as if she'd ordered him to strip naked.

He obeyed, slowly, with shoulders hunched against the others waiting, so no one else would see; with his right hand, he unfastened the left set of cufflinks, placed them on the counter, undid the pearl buttons on the left sleeve—it was clearly a _very_ expensive shirt—and slowly pushed up the sleeve to his elbow, as if baring his arm for an injection.

All that Mary saw on that pale, thin forearm was a tattoo—a remarkably crude and ugly tattoo, with a snake emerging from the jaws of a skull, the sort of thing they do in prison or in gangs, not at all what she would have expected from this long-haired schoolboy… and it was a bad job, too, looked as if it may have been infected in the past, because the whole design was raised, and the inking blotchy and faded.

McConnell's voice was at her ear now. "Have you _ever_ seen that design before?"

Mary almost shook her head, when there was a remembering twinge in her chest, and an answering quiver in her stomach. She whispered, "The last time it was a firework."

She looked up, and the boy was staring at her now, his eyes wide and his whole face rigid in the attempt to control his expression. He licked his lips, and whispered, "I'm sorry."

She didn't remember his face from before, but of course that didn't mean anything.

She turned to McConnell, "Did he kill Jackie?"

McConnell says, "No, but he's the only one walking free with _that_ on his arm."

ooo

Mary bustles about the kitchen, taking out the dishes, uncorking a bottle of wine; the take-away, in its white boxes, fills the room with its marvelous savor. McConnell turns to her and says she doesn't mean to be discourteous, simply that … it's so strange out here, in this other world. Except for duty, she's never been here. Certainly, she's never been in anyone's _home._

"Any _Muggle _home, you mean," Mary says. She still isn't sure who's designated by that funny word, if it's insulting or neutral. "So Jackie's Aunt Amelia wasn't a … Muggle."

McConnell looks at her for a moment, then bursts into laughter. "Oh no, no." Laughs some more, an unexpectedly musical sound, wipes tears away. "No. Amelia Bones, the head of Dimly, a Muggle? No, I think not."

_Eccentric_ had been Mary's first word for Amelia Bones, with her short hair and monocle, her boots and her swirling nineteenth-century redingote, and that lordly white Persian always following at her heels. Darius—who did in fact conduct himself as if he were King of Kings—looked her over on their first acquaintance, then condescended to be petted, which Jackie assured her was the highest compliment.

"So I've been vetted by your aunt's familiar," she'd said, with a laugh.

Jackie had laughed along as well, "You're more right than you know," she'd said.

Aunt Amelia had served them a wonderfully eclectic supper, followed by Turkish Delight and very strong coffee in tiny cups. The conversation was neutral, but Mary had had the distinct impression that she had passed an interview.

That impression had been reinforced on subsequent visits. Aunt Amelia came to all of Jackie's performances, sometimes with women friends her age, who might have been colleagues (except that Mary was not quite sure where Amelia did work, or if she were simply being too middle-class in assuming that she did); and once, with a tiny, wizened woman all in black, who was by far the witchiest of them, and whom Jackie addressed very respectfully as Madam Marchbanks.

She remembers Madam Marchbanks because she had said, with a straight face, that she rather enjoyed this _modern_ style of performance, for all one might feel nostalgic for the palmy days of the Divine Sarah. It was _bracing,_ she said, and Jackie was quite good at it.

And then she'd turned directly to Mary, and said how very pleased she was to meet the girl who had made Amelia's Jackie so very happy, and extended her tiny, wrinkled hand with an air of royal condescension.

Mary accepted the handshake; to this day, she remembers a certain _electricity_ and strength in it. Whoever Madam Marchbanks was in their circle, it was plain that she was a woman of power.

And she had quite a dry sense of humor about aging, too, to be claiming with a straight face that she remembered Sarah Bernhardt in her prime, and (over the eternal coffee and Turkish Delight afterward) that her mother had seen the immortal Rachel on her London tour.

ooo

**Author's notes:**

Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) toured England in the 1880s and 1890s (George Bernard Shaw reviewed some of her performances, although he did not care for her style of acting); Rachel (Elise-Rachel Felix, 1821-1858) toured London in 1841.


	14. Chapter 14

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Mary is surprised that this outing happened at all, because of what she had said, in the waiting room.

When she recognized that emblem, the ugly skull and snake, her stomach lurched at the sudden vision of it glowing green in the night sky above an ordinary eighteenth-century square in London, the sidewalks gleaming with rain and throwing back that deathly glow along with the neon.

She dreams it, she flashes on it in daylight, these last three days: darkness and rain-slicked pavement and a malevolent leering dead face over the rooftops, _death itself_ with a living serpent for a tongue, the sort of thing someone might invent who was in love with death, or who feared it enough to kill others in order to feel immortal…

All through it ripples high inhuman laughter—

It's nightmare or else waking reality and she is not sure which horrifies her more.

Thirty seconds went missing—complete blackness—and then she was staring into the stricken face of that skinny blond boy, and he was hissing to McConnell, his sharp white teeth showing and his thin lips pulled back in a feral grimace: "Are you satisfied, you utter ghoul?"

Then brisk sensible Granger was stepping in, and handing him the cufflinks.

His hands shook so badly that he dropped them; Mary heard them ring on the floor. Granger stooped and picked them up, and then with the precision and gentleness of a surgeon, she took hold of his left wrist and rolled down the crisp white sleeve—as if the skin beneath were sunburnt and she might cause pain if cloth were to touch it—and fastened the cuff for him, fumbling a little with the cufflinks.

This time he did not flinch at her touch, but stood there with the passivity of a child being dressed by its mother.

She said, "I'll take care of this." There was a little cry; the baby had woken. "Go see to her; it's all right. I'll sort it."

Then Granger said to McConnell, "You know this is going straight to Kingsley."

Mary has heard voices that calm once or twice in her life; on one occasion, that sensible, arctic stillness was the prelude to attempted murder.

McConnell said something about loose cannons and the chain of command, and Granger replied, "I don't have a chain of command. I don't belong to your world, McConnell. They can give me all the medals they like, but I remember who was first in line for torture."

McConnell said, "Your parents are still alive. Both of them."

Granger's eyes narrowed, as if she were a cat testing its balance for a lethal pounce; in a cold, reasonable voice she said, "No thanks to any of _your lot,_ so if I were you, I wouldn't raise the subject."

McConnell said, "_His bloody father…"_ and then faltered, her voice uncharacteristically thick.

Oddly, Granger relaxed a little, and in a much gentler tone (a tone Mary recognized as that of Dr. Rosencrantz) she said, "You know, you can still be put on the list if you like."

By then Mary had come back to herself; she said, "She's right. I don't think you want to play this out by bullying little boys." She added, "It demeans the dignity of your profession." And then, "In any event, you will _not_ bully my patients."

She knows what is in those files: that boy's mother, the Black Widow, is still clinically depressed, apathetic, scarcely able to care for her child; she still has nightmares from the period of her captivity and she's wracked by guilt because her husband is in prison for twenty years and she escaped with probation. Though from the outline in the notes it's the usual story: he had ambitions, dragged her in over both their heads…

… and the son, of course, is a pitiable case, because he never had a chance. An arrogant swaggering schoolyard bully, and then a child soldier, and after that a hostage, and now... the little man, the boy too young to be a head of family, gamely taking on the role of father to his baby sister.

What's odd, of course, which Mary doesn't think about until later, is that McConnell was armed—is armed even now—and could have done who knows what… except that Mary has always been in charge in that waiting room, and that is not going to change now. If someone chooses to strike her dead for it, then she will die in the performance of her duty.

What she should have been thinking then, what she should be thinking now: this woman is a _witch. _She could kill me as we stand here. We'll never be equals.

Yet, oddly, she doesn't.

McConnell backed down, and frowned, and looked shamefaced at the boy sitting in the uncomfortable plastic chair and rocking his little sister. Finally she said to Granger, "All right, then."

And to Mary she said, "It won't happen again."

ooo

McConnell—is she McConnell or is she Addie?—looks at the pictures of Jackie, and the posters, looks out the window at the glorious sunshine, accepts a glass of wine.

Her expression is wistful, as she says, "I felt sorry for her, you know. But if they hadn't given me that assignment I never would have crossed the border. We don't, you know, most of us. We keep to our own."

She takes a sip of the wine and smiles in approval. Mary's pleased; it's a respectable vintage, not too expensive, of course.

"I felt sorry for her, because after all she was a Squib. And then… I realized she was living in a larger world than I was."

Mary asks the question again, "So how many of you are there?"

This time she evades it in a different way. "Everyone you see in that waiting room is related—well, all but a few." She outlines the family trees, how the Black Widow is related by blood to the Red-Headed League, and to the Rock Star, and to Granger's boyfriend … who's second cousin once removed (if she recalls aright) to the girl that Mary took for the Widow's daughter, but who was actually imprisoned in the Widow's house during the war. Even the Rock Star and his red-headed girlfriend are cousins of some sort.

It's complex enough to give an untrained listener a headache, but Mary has years of practice with this sort of thing, with medical histories and other matters. It's a small, complicated, ingrown world, quite similar, in its way, to the artificial family of a regiment, or for that matter, a medical specialty.

"So who _isn't_ related?"

She frowns. "Well, Finnegan's mother was one of us, and Thomas's father; Granger, I think, is the only one… no, there's Finch-Fletchley, and Goldstein. And that would be it. All the rest of them are ours."

"So you're related to all of them as well?"

Addie nods. Yes, she's definitely Addie. "I'm sure you don't want to hear the details, but yes."

"Even that boy you were bullying."

"We're all related, all the old families. My great-grandmother was a Lestrange."

Mary frowns; the name means nothing.

"I'm related to the man who murdered Jackie."


	15. Chapter 15

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Addie McConnell is standing in the cool light from the perfect summer sky outside, the sort of sky that makes Mary feel patriotic about being English, and some of the sunlight catches in the edge of her wine glass.

It's the texture of the curtains that catches on Mary's eyes, and the odd little knickknacks that she has forgotten entirely having lined up on the windowsill, though she must have done so, in another life, in the life when Jackie lived here, or visited often enough, overnight especially, that all of the neighbors assumed that she lived here. And she is calmly conversing with a woman who is kin to Jackie's murderer—if so, there was a murder she cannot remember, for the spell is still in place that makes it impossible for her to remember that night. All that wakes in memory is the glowing skull and snake in the sky over the square where Jackie lived.

Where she lived. Where she died, as well, the same night as her aunt. Killed by a kinsman of the woman who stands before her, ordinary brown hair and eyes green-brown, like the light in a stream deep in a forest.

At least she can remember that Jackie is dead.

Mary watches as Addie lifts the glass to her lips, and takes a sip, and inexplicably a phrase comes to her, _the wine-dark sea,_ and she thinks how deep that sea must be, to absorb all light, and to throw back a color like blood.

For they are all bound by blood, this coterie of strangers who live nestled in their enclaves, or disguised in the open—the Granger girl lives in suburban London, in a house on an ordinary street, that has a real address—and their feuds go back centuries. From time to time, she understands now, someone is born as one of them, but into an ordinary family: someone with a name as commonplace as Granger or Finnegan or Thomas or Goldstein.

The late war seems to have settled that question, whether those foreign-born folk are _their own_ or not, in the affirmative.

Jackie was one of them but not; never in all the time had she seen anything untoward happen in her presence, though out of the corner of her eye, at Aunt Amelia's, odd things happened all the time. It was a dreamlike place, that apartment, a sort of museum of Victorian Orientalism, and what's more… very much larger inside than she would have expected from the outside. At the time, she'd admired that as a clever stage-effect.

At length Addie says, "I don't blame you if you take it hard… I needn't…"

"No," Mary says. "Stay." She nods at the glass of wine. "Enjoy." She asks, "Did you hesitate because he was your relative?"

Addie gives her a speaking look, and then apparently decides that something can be explained about the assumptions she's just violated. "I knew _of_ him, of course. But no, we hadn't grown up together under the care of the same house-elf. At best, I knew him by reputation. And the last…" She looks down. "He was faster than I was. At least she didn't suffer."

That was the thing Mary had wanted to know and hadn't dared ask, and the expression on McConnell's face would indicate that she's not lying…but who knows with professionals. That face is open and shuttered at the same time, and Mary now finds it more than a little sinister that she cannot remember that face when she thinks about it after.

Mary says, "The way you say that… it wasn't the case for others, was it?"

McConnell shakes her head. "Not my mother, certainly." She takes a deep breath. "And Greyback got my sister and brother. Nine and ten years old." She closes her eyes, fingers still grasping the wineglass, and Mary sees the tension in the fine muscles of her forearm. Mary waits; that face, eyes closed and brows pulled together and mouth compressed, is what a tragic mask would look like if it were British; it's the tense surface behind which nightmare is playing out.

At length, McConnell opens her eyes, and says, in a matter-of-fact way, "Of course you don't know the details." She places the wine glass on the table, and fishes in the pocket of her loose black trousers to produce a folded piece of something like paper.

It's a newspaper clipping, but a very peculiar one: the photographs move, just like that one Mary had seen before, of the pink-haired girl and her amber-eyed husband. Only these are in black-and-white, and the faces… almost all of the faces are terrifying, with a handful of exceptions, with eyes that open onto darkness in a way that Mary has seen only a very few times in her life.

McConnell silently indicates the two she means.

There's a man who's scarcely a man, but nearly half wolf; it's not the shape of the features so much as the expression… no, it is the shape of the features, and when the lips lift in a snarling sneer, the teeth that show are pointed. Mary tears her eyes away from the eyes that find hers with predatory intent, and reads the caption, "Fenrir Greyback, werewolf. Confirmed dead in the Battle of Hogwarts. Read interviews with his victims, page 5 (inside)."

The other is the very obverse, icy and something colder than human; where the wolf-man is all hot blood and slavering hunger, seemingly poised to leap through the picture, this figure recedes, as if to draw away from the lesser beings looking at him from the other side of the picture plane. He's all planes and angles, long pale hair and pale eyes and sharp cheekbones, as if a cubist sculptor had been given the assignment of crafting a human being out of arctic ice. The resemblance to the boy in the waiting room is unmistakable, and the surname confirms it. "Lucius Malfoy, second-in-command to the late Dark Lord. The indictment in full, page 3."

His picture is flanked by that of his wife, the woman Mary knows as the Black Widow, and his son, who looks back at the viewer with terrified and bewildered eyes; the background is unclear but Mary has the sense that he's backed against a wall and can retreat no further. The captions indicate that they, too, are accused of war crimes, for the details of which the reader is also referred to page three.

At length McConnell says, "Lucius Malfoy is the most thorough bastard ever to walk the earth. He oversaw my mother's torture."

Mary says, "And you cannot forgive his son the resemblance." McConnell shakes her head. "I can't say that wouldn't be a normal reaction. It's a very strong resemblance. Only the boy seems to be mostly harmless." More than this she cannot say; she knows the details in the medical record, but those are between Dr. Burgess and the boy himself.

McConnell says, "And Greyback was Malfoy's tool, before the worm turned…" She adds that the Malfoy family apparently fell from favor with their Lord, and spent the last year of the war as hostages in their own home, but the father in the pride of his power was inhumanly cruel, almost a match for his sister-in-law, their Lord's torturer-in-chief…

Mary says, "I think that you ought to take up Granger on her offer." She adds, "I don't know what military discipline is on your side of the border, but it sounds as if you're already in trouble with Kingsley as it is…" She frowns. "He's your commanding officer, is he?"

McConnell says, "Not exactly. He's… the Minister." She adds, "Like your Prime Minister. Only we don't have a Queen."

Mary blinks in surprise, as she realizes what that means. Kingsley had spoken of _his veterans,_ and what he had meant was the full roster of front-line forces in this mysterious war, on both sides, as many of them were willing to come forward and ask for help. "Your world is _very_ small," she says.

McConnell sits down, looking shaken and human for the first time. "Yes, it is. I suppose it is." And then, quite unexpectedly, she puts her hands over her face and weeps silently, like an abandoned child who is afraid of making a fuss. At length she says in a low voice, "There's no one left." Anticipating the question, she says, "My father was killed in the First War. I joined Dimly to avenge him, really. Although my family's always been in Dimly, so it wasn't hard."

Mary puts a comforting hand on her shoulder. "I think you should take up that offer."

McConnell—Addie—looks up at her. "Then I won't see you any more."

Mary says, "Not on duty, certainly." She adds, "But it sounds as if you've been on duty rather too long."

For generations, in fact, but that doesn't need saying. _Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart. _That had been another civil war entirely and from the other end of the century, but that was Addie McConnell to the life.

ooo

**Author's note:** "the wine-dark sea" from Homer's Iliad; "too long a sacrifice" from W. B. Yeats, "Easter 1916."


	16. Chapter 16

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

It's four o'clock in the morning; through the windows open to the predawn darkness, the birds are making themselves known. Hermione nurses her morning coffee, wondering if she will ever return fully to daylight life. She sleeps better than she did, but the jet-lag has been extraordinarily hard to shake, and then there's the excursion to take place that day, the return invitation to Malfoy Manor. Her father is uncommonly excited about the chance for a tour of the grounds at a stately home, even one on the other side of the border.

She never has told them what happened to her there. What's the point, after all? Neville knows, of course; oddly enough, one of their first times together, it came up… in this very place, in fact, one day after reception duty at the clinic. They sat in this kitchen, with the afternoon sun slanting in, and had tea, and then… and then kissed, or rather he looked at her in that sweet inquiring way, and she stood up and leaned across the table to kiss him, to say that yes, she'd meant that first impetuous kiss in the hallway at the clinic.

She still remembers the strain in her back and legs, because that kiss from an awkward angle lasted a very long time. When he reluctantly released her, she drew back and touched the livid scar across his cheekbone. He read that caress as a question, and told the story of it in more detail than she had expected.

When in return he stroked her cheek and neck, he chanced to touch the fine line on her neck, silvery she would suppose, where Bellatrix had drawn her knife across the skin in threat (under that barely visible thread of scar beats the carotid artery). Her torture at the Manor was so long ago, and she'd had months of counseling, so it ought to have been safe, but in the course of the telling, a full-blown flashback overtook her, of which she was miserably ashamed afterward.

Neville asked her if she expected that she ought to be stronger than other people, and she answered without hesitation, "Of course."

He came around to her side of the table, sat beside her, and with his arms about her and his cheek against hers, he told her how he'd played that role—the tower of strength—for the better part of a year. In Harry's place. By the end, he'd forgotten it was a part; it felt more like an expectation. They'd all forgotten who Harry really was, for they'd turned him into a fictional character, an icon or idol of defiance, that asked of them unyielding heroism.

Now that the war was over, it would be safe to re-learn how to be merely human… which thought he concluded with a kiss on her forehead.

ooo

She startles, and sets down the cup. There's an owl pecking at the glass. To be expected, of course, because she's removed another layer of defensive charms, and now she's on the Owl Post once more. She opens the window and starts at the huge wingspan of the creature, and its ferocious expression; it's an eagle owl of rather majestic appearance.

It isn't until she feeds the owl its treat—actually, a double or triple ration—and it relents sufficiently to let her untie the letter from its leg, that she sees the seal on it, a complex device of heraldic serpents, green with a netting of silver scales, on a black ground. Very pretentious and likely hereditarily Slytherin, ah yes, so it is, for the letter is from Draco.

She drinks the last of the coffee as she reads the letter and the owl waits, glowering, for her reply. At least he isn't showing up unannounced at four o'clock in the morning, but politely asking if he may pay a social call some hours later. It isn't her he means to meet, of course, but her mother, who is still asleep upstairs.

Given the events of the last few weeks, Hermione is confident enough to extend the invitation in her place.

ooo

Their correspondence had begun with the garden party, at which Narcissa fell into pleasant conversation with Hermione's father about rose bushes (which still strikes her as surreal). After the meal, she expected that her mother and Neville's Gran would talk, leaving her and Neville and Draco to entertain the baby as they had before dinner.

It had turned out quite differently. She fell to talking with Gran about some point of occult engineering—impolite, she knows, to talk shop over dessert, but sometimes she can't help herself.

In her absorption, she lost track of the conversation about her, and when next she paid attention, she heard Draco asking her mother's advice about babies, Hypatia in particular, and whether she might be teething; she seemed fretful of late. They were fully as absorbed in their colloquy as Narcissa and William had been in the discussion of rose breeding.

At length, Elizabeth told him that it couldn't all be explained in one go, and he followed her to her study, to accept the loan of some popular books on child development. Elizabeth said she expected that much of babyhood was the same on both sides of the border. "Until the wild magic starts," she added, "which of course isn't covered in our standard references. I expect you'll be hard put to keep up with her then, but I suppose you're prepared for that sort of thing. I must say it took _me_ by surprise."

(In all the years she's known him, Draco Malfoy has never smiled as he did at her mother's, her _Muggle_ mother's implication that his baby sister was going to be a formidable witch. That genuine, incandescent smile made him briefly beautiful.)

He asked if he might forward further questions by Owl, and Elizabeth said that she would be more than happy to answer them.

It took more than a few of those letters for Hermione to understand the situation. Narcissa puts on a brave face, but it's Draco who's caring for the child, and feeling increasingly frightened at the task he's undertaken. Hermione only recently has come to understand that Narcissa is seriously depressed, which realization was substantially delayed by the role she plays in Hermione's nightmares.

She can't help comparing Draco's situation to Harry's, but Harry isn't raising Teddy alone; he's helping Andromeda, and for all her losses, Teddy's grandmother is in better spirits than her sister. Andromeda Tonks is that rarest of all creatures, the practical-minded rebel, and she has extensive experience in living on slender means. Teddy has an official godfather in Harry, and an unofficial godmother in Ginny, and a whole crowd of unofficial relations in the Weasley clan. As Molly Weasley's first grandchild, he is fussed over more than any child in wizarding Britain, Hermione would be willing to wager. He is a cheerful, curious child who charms everyone he meets…

… well, with the possible exception of Crookshanks. Teddy Lupin is in love with Crookshanks, but the passion is not reciprocated. Crookshanks hides as soon as Teddy puts in an appearance.

Harry and Ginny brought him over the other day, and Crookshanks disappeared upstairs as soon as he heard Teddy's voice. Teddy is passionate in his affections, and flings himself on what he loves; his approach to his great-aunt Narcissa in the waiting room was quite typical. He's fascinated by hair and spectacles; when he's holding Teddy, Harry still has to take his spectacles off and hold them out of range.

Ginny has cut her hair short, claiming that it gets in her eyes less when playing Quidditch, but given that she wore it long through her entire career as Seeker in their sixth year, Hermione suspects that the real reason for the new coiffure is her impetuous godson.

ooo

Hermione's mother is the first one down the stairs, dressed already for their expedition in sensible but elegant clothes, loose long sleeves and light fabric to keep off the sun. She sets about preparing breakfast, a substantial one by the look of it; she's always believed in feeding up properly before an expedition.

"There was an Owl, mum," Hermione says. "Malfoy wanted to know if he could stop by early, so I told him you'd be in."

Elizabeth Granger smiles wryly at her daughter. "I've been meaning to ask why you still call each other by surnames."

It isn't the question that startles, so much as her mother's sharp dark eyes on her. She realizes that Neville's Gran has the same sort of eyes, as does Minerva McGonagall, which may be why she's never been very much intimidated by either of them—well, no more than she is by her mother, which is to say, that she's been surrounded by female Powers all her life.

She shrugs. "I don't know. It's what we've always called each other, when he hasn't been calling names." She pours herself another cup of coffee. "It just seems… safer, somehow. We're not friends, exactly, but he isn't an enemy anymore."

"He calls you Hermione when he talks to me."

"I suppose it would be odd for him to call me Granger, given you have the same name." She frowns. "I think I don't understand."

"Your father and I had lunch with Arthur Weasley at the Leaky Cauldron last week. He showed me the press clippings."

She puts down two earthenware plates laden with breakfast. "I know you already ate your notion of a breakfast, but you ought to have a bit more. I suspect the Manor grounds are rather more extensive than you'd think."

Hermione says that she wouldn't know, not having walked them, but nonetheless obediently picks up her fork and starts to eat.

"There are some things you didn't tell us, it would seem, not that I quite blame you. Arthur Weasley talked quite a bit about how well you've borne up in the late unpleasantness; I suppose he thought we knew what had happened to you at the Manor. He said the Minister was considering a commendation for you, for your work in the relief efforts. The Healers at St. Mungo's are quite impressed with the things they're learning at that clinic."

Hermione shrugs; it isn't her doing, really, so much as Kingsley's.

"He says that it sent the right message, that you put Mrs. Malfoy on the list for the clinic. All sorts of people are coming forward for help now, he says, the ordinary people who were on the other side for practical reasons, and it's looking as if they might actually have something like peace this time."

"I heard her testimony at the trial. She had a bad time of it," Hermione says. "And she did help Harry, at the end." After a pause she adds, "And Malfoy didn't identify us when we were at the Manor. But really, it was a matter of fairness. People who are suffering shouldn't be denied help because they were on the wrong side."

Her mother sits down opposite her. "Draco told me just how it was he came to ask for help. That he came here, and you weren't afraid of him, and that made all the difference. And he's quite grateful for the help you gave his mother." There's a pause, and she adds, "I don't think I've ever met a young man quite so devoted to his mother. He isn't much on general principles, I think, but if you're kind to him and his, it goes a long way."

They eat breakfast in silence, and then Elizabeth says, "I mention it because he trusts you completely, but he isn't quite sure what you think of him."

Hermione flicks her wand and sets the breakfast dishes to washing themselves. "It never occurred to me that it made a difference." She feels an odd twinge in her chest, thinking about the notion that she's _trusted completely_ by Draco Malfoy of all people. It makes him seem warm-blooded, even human.

Some of that twinge is shame, because she really never did think that he might have feelings about the matter. She had reacted to his pain—yes, that desperation on his first visit had been sufficient to override his fear and hatred both—and done her duty, nothing more.

Now, she's not quite sure how, he's something like a family friend, or at least a member of the circle. He shows up unannounced from time to time, sometimes with Hypatia in tow. He asks her mother for advice about baby care, and before long it will be child-rearing. He's apologized to Neville, and to her: to Neville, for making fun of his disabled parents, and to her, for publicly wishing her dead and for his _obscene remark_ (so he put it) at the Quidditch World Cup. Particularly the latter, as he had quite consciously set out to shock and offend her.

She supposes that she ought to say something to him, if it is worrying him what she thinks of him. It's a tricky matter, though, because she's not quite sure what she does think.

ooo

**Author's note:** This fic is updated at the will of the Muse, and for some reason the Muse is finding this Independence Day weekend particularly inspiring.

Thanks to all of its faithful readers for your loyalty to this tale in spite of its intermittent posting schedule. My deepest gratitude to those who took time to respond with signed or anonymous reviews.


	17. Chapter 17

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Draco talks to baby Hypatia all the time. He tells her about the routine for the day as he bathes and then dresses her: how they're going to go to the Grangers' and they will visit Madam Granger—and she likes Madam Granger, doesn't she? he certainly does—and then they will take a long stroll in the rose gardens of the Manor. There will be the nice smell of the roses and maybe they will see some Kneazles. If they do, she isn't to chase them. (He warns her about this even though she hasn't yet even shown an interest in crawling. One can't start too early.) Kneazles don't like to be chased, and she'll do well to notice what happened the last time her cousin Teddy chased Crookshanks, who is only _part_ Kneazle.

Bathing she likes; dressing she doesn't. She wiggles; it seems there's always an extra arm to be guided through a sleeve. It's even worse when he has to dress her in Muggle clothes rather than traditional long shirt and over-robe, because then there are extra legs to worry him as well.

He points out birds winging their way across the summer sky outside the nursery window, and the occasional neighbor taking a morning broomstick ride. Of course, she can't see the Thestrals, but he points them out anyway, and tells her that she's lucky she can't see them. He hopes it's a long time before she looks on the face of death.

Madam Granger's books have reassured him that talking to the baby like this does not mean that he's going mad. It's good for the baby, so the books say, even if those books concern themselves only with baby Muggles. A baby witch or wizard isn't easily distinguishable from a baby Muggle in the first two years, except in rare cases. (His mother still smiles proudly when she tells him that he had his first wild magic at eighteen months.)

But it's Madam Granger who really reassures him, by commending the baby on the brightness of her eyes and the alertness of her demeanor. Hypatia seems to take after her cousin Teddy, because she's begun grasping things. The first thing was his nose. The second was a handful of his hair, which he'd carelessly forgotten to tie back before beginning her bath.

This morning his hair is swept back and fastened at the nape with a silver clasp that had been his father's. It's grown out since it was cropped for Azkaban and the trial, but as yet it's barely long enough to make a queue.

Madam Granger said that if he finds himself worried about the baby's progress, he might ask for a recommendation at the clinic; they would certainly not object if he wanted to take the baby to a pediatrician—but that is rather more than he is ready to do. Muggle healers strike him as inexpert; after all, they don't use wands, and they can't re-grow bones in a night, so he is not prepared to trust his baby sister to their ministrations. Even if she proves a Squib, she's still no Muggle.

Madam Granger did not argue with him, merely looked at him with her witch's eyes and let the matter drop.

He and Hypatia wake late, and alone, at the Manor most days. His mother rises early, and works in the rose garden. She feeds the peacocks; she's put up barriers around her roses to keep them out, the only concession to his father's absence, but she gives them free reign outside her own domain. When Hypatia is bathed and dressed, she is presented to her mother for the first feeding of the day.

This morning his mother is arranging the room that faces the terrace and the gardens, in order to receive their guests. When the doors to the terrace are opened, the room will fill with summer air and softly shaded sunlight and the smell of roses. By common agreement, the tour of the house will not include its deeper reaches, even though the formal dining room and the drawing room have been re-decorated since the trials.

Hypatia does not like the Manor, especially at night; he takes her for walks in Muggle London until she falls asleep. During the day he is out and about with her, for he has a courtesy stop in Diagon Alley two or three days a week. His renegade Aunt Andromeda expects him for eleven o'clock tea at her book shop. The Death Eaters burned her shop during the war, but with help from the Ministry and the reconstruction fund, she has re-established her business in its old place next to Flourish and Blott's. She deals in Muggle books, which along with other faces of Muggle culture, have excited rather a lot of curiosity since the war. Increasingly, the morning tea ceremony would be stolen time if two or three of the customers didn't join them and chat about what they are reading.

ooo

He knew of Andromeda but only by name. She arrived at the Muggle hospital just after Hypatia was born, and the doctors didn't hesitate to admit her to his mother's bedside. Who summoned her or what she said he doesn't know, only that he was sent to sit in the hall with Granger while the two sisters talked for rather a long time.

When she emerged, she took them to the hospital visitor's tea room, where she formally introduced herself as his mother's sister. All he could think was how much she looked like Aunt Bellatrix, _who is dead,_ a voice in his head repeated, _dead and damned, but not before she damned me as well._

In spite of the family resemblance, Andromeda Black Tonks is far more like Madam Granger than she is like Bellatrix Lestrange,. She is brisk and sensible and that's comforting. Aunt Aundromeda was the first to have treated him like a grownup in all of these proceedings. Granger-the-younger, _Hermione_ (the given name still feels awkward in his mind, and yet more on his lips), judged him on his first reaction and brushed him aside as a useless child who was having hysterics. Of course, she's a Muggle-born, so giving birth in a Muggle hospital is a perfectly reasonable thing in her view.

It wasn't until after Granger departed for an appointment elsewhere that his aunt had _the talk_ with him.

"Your mother is in a bad way," Andromeda said, looking him right in the eyes. "You are the Heir of the House of Malfoy, and that's going to mean something rather different than you've been led to think."

He nodded, because he thought he already knew that. He and his newborn sister are the last bearers of the Malfoy name. Lucius Malfoy's last act as a citizen of wizarding Britain had been to change the terms of transmission for that name; he would seem to have had little confidence in his son's marriage prospects. Whether by marriage to the son or the daughter of the house, the name will continue.

_Not that anyone would want it now, _he thought, and squelched the thought.

"If you're not prepared to take responsibility," she said, "I'll see about adopting her."

He bridled at the notion, and of course his father would have _more than objected_ at the idea of his daughter becoming Hypatia Tonks (that dreadful, Mugglish surname, that sounds like a bolt dropping into a tin bucket). That adoption would have made her the posthumous sister of the Metamorphmagus who married the werewolf…

"Absolutely not," he said.

"Then you are prepared to be her foster-father?" Andromeda asked. "And that means father in the full sense of the word."

He had no idea what that meant, of course, when he said yes.

ooo

He has sent regrets to Aunt Andromeda this morning, of course, because he's going to be at the Manor all day, with his mother and the Grangers and Neville Longbottom, who is inseparable from his fiancée (so he reads the situation) but may also have wangled an invitation by virtue of his competence in Herbology. His mother has been complaining about something terrifying that has taken root in the formal gardens and eaten some of the wild Kneazles as well as a number of the peacocks.

He saw Longbottom's eyes light up at the prospect of identifying it and possibly transplanting it to the Hogwarts greenhouses, and thought, _he looks just_ _like that oaf Hagrid in Care of Magical Creatures, delighted with the temporary custody of a clutch of Blast-Ended Skrewts. _

Actually he isn't sure if _oaf_ really is the right characterization of Hagrid; perhaps _madman_ might be fairer. He still can't shake the constant apprehension he felt in that class, the class on which his father had insisted because the Heir to the Manor needed to know about magical creatures. He still remembers Blaise Zabini rolling about giggling when he found out it was really about the white peacocks, which are such a Malfoy family hallmark that it's quite surprising that they don't in fact appear on the family crest.

On the other hand, Hypatia is delighted by the peacocks; she answers their unearthly shrieks with squawks of her own, which invariably leads to an unholy racket as they answer in kind, no doubt to correct her accent.

He gathers her up, shoulders the bag with the baby things (should she need distraction while at the Grangers') and takes his wand in hand to Apparate. The reply to his Owl, in Granger's hand, assures him that he'll be welcome at breakfast.

ooo

**Author's note:** The notion that the peacocks are the reason for hapless Draco's presence in Hagrid's class I owe to Silver Sailor Ganymede; see her amusing little fic 'Creature Comforts.'


	18. Chapter 18

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

At eleven o'clock in the morning, having toured the rose gardens, Hermione is drinking tea out of the most elegant cup she has ever seen. Likely the tea set, with its crest of serpents, would qualify as a museum piece both for age and rarity. She savors the light taste of the tea as she looks out at the sunlit gardens of Malfoy Manor.

Her father and Narcissa have not stopped talking, and he's jotting a list of books and periodicals that she _absolutely must_ read.

Her mother has inquired as to what sorts of toys the wizarding world provides for its children, and Draco has vanished into the deeper reaches of the house to fetch his own collection. As expected, it's quite extensive: there is the toy broom, the miniature Potions kit, the animated creatures, including at least seven figurines of dragons, representing the major species of the British Isles and Scandinavia. Hypatia loves them, but has to be restrained from attempting to stuff them into her mouth (well, some things are universal). There's also a full set of walking and flying Quidditch figurines, representing some of the major international teams, and a wizarding chess set of Persian make that's been in the family for over seven hundred years.

Narcissa looks over and smiles at her son with his playthings, although Hermione notices something very sad about the expression; no doubt she's remembering happier days… well, which would not have been happy days at all to certain segments of the population (herself included).

The gardens are beautiful, flourishing and serene under a perfect summer sky. The paradox of this place is that it's gracious and well-proportioned, but terrible things have happened here. She looks out over the terrace from which one can view the gardens: Narcissa's rose garden, where white blooms glow among the green, and beyond that the mazes and fountains of the formal gardens.

From here, she can see the path they traversed earlier in the morning: her father and mother in their best walking clothes and sensible shoes (elegance balanced against practicality, with the latter breaking the tie); Narcissa in her gardener's robes and broad-brimmed hat; Draco carrying Hypatia (who is wearing a sun-bonnet of decidedly Muggle cut); and Neville, looking rather surprisingly like the wizarding notion of a country gentleman. Of the lot of them, it's still Neville who surprises her the most, perhaps because he was so shy and awkward when he was young, but now knows exactly the right note to sound on any given occasion.

Having finished his tea and biscuits, Neville is consulting his Herbology references in preparation for the expedition to the formal gardens to view the carnivorous plant. He tells Narcissa that it's worrying that nothing corresponding to her description turns up in his books; he's concerned that it may be an invasive species, in which case they ought to inform the Ministry as soon as possible. In that case, Professor Sprout _definitely_ will be interested in looking at it, and he will make sure that Madam Malfoy receives proper acknowledgments in any publication.

Narcissa thanks him in advance, after the fashion of a lady to her knight, for investigating this distressing matter.

He assures her that the pleasure, and the privilege, is all his. Hermione smiles, realizing that he caught himself before he uttered the phrase _contributing to the advancement of science,_ but after all that's what he means. Augusta has been hinting to him that he might consider study at a Muggle university, for botany and Herbology are much the same thing in their essentials, and there are only so many species of magical plants.

Meanwhile, Draco has placed Hypatia carefully in Elizabeth Granger's lap, very definitely as if vouchsafing a treasure to reliable hands, while he waves his wand to summon the miniature Quidditch players to a game. Hypatia shrieks—she doesn't laugh yet, but this noise evidently means delight—and Elizabeth says to her daughter, "So this is the game you were mentioning in your letters."

William turns from his colloquy with Narcissa to watch. What Draco's mother likely _doesn't_ know is that Elizabeth and William took the _Prophet _for years and William became quite addicted to the Quidditch pages, for which Hermione thanks (or blames) Arthur Weasley. It's the one thing William regrets about losing Ron Weasley as a prospective son-in-law, for Neville has no particular interest in the game. He can make conversation about it, just as he can chat with Andrew about football, but given his choice, he prefers other topics.

The players are in the colors of Bulgaria and Ireland, and Hermione, with a little twinge of romantic nostalgia, notices the likeness of Viktor Krum among them. She looks up to meet Neville's eyes, and is warmed by the smile that lights up his whole face. There is no jealousy, as there would have been with Ron, no regret or recrimination. Neville regards Viktor Krum with affectionate respect as a wizard and a man: perceptive enough to have recognized from afar what he had known for years.

It's the first time in months that she has thought of Ron, not as a colleague in the post-war reconstruction, but as the boy she thought she would marry.

ooo

Hermione is quite sure that she never would have predicted any of this: not her parents taking tea with Narcissa Malfoy, not her mother playing virtual godmother to Draco's baby sister (the actual godmother being his Aunt Andromeda), certainly not Neville by her side. At the end of the war, she had been quite sure that place would be filled by Ron.

She still remembers the morning after the battle: just after sun-up, light breaking over the Great Hall, Ron's arm around her (Harry having vanished somewhere else), Neville eating breakfast in the Great Hall with the Sword of Gryffindor by his plate (as if it were part of the place setting, her brain absurdly filled in—the free-association of sleep deprivation there, no doubt). She remembers the way that Neville's shaggy hair kept hanging over his face and threatening to drag in the food…

She had a very definite picture of what was to come next: a very hot bath, the hottest she could find, and then clean pyjamas, and a bed. Sleep, and then breakfast with Ron. After that, in some order: finish her schooling, get a job, some sort of political job with the Ministry, and eventually marry Ron and have two or three little red-haired children with impossible hair.

The morning of the victory, with Ron's arm securely about her, solid as the world, for all they were both swaying from sleep deprivation and shuddering in relief that it was over, she'd watched the crowds of admirers around Neville: well, not to put too fine a point on it, a good number of them female. She and Ron had broken into laughter at the thought that Neville might be in danger of becoming the next Gilderoy Lockhart, admired by all the witches in Britain.

Not a serious danger, for once he finished his breakfast, he looked about in a bemused fashion, then shook hands all around. He did accept hugs and kisses from Ginny and Luna; in fact, there was a point when the three of them (the officers of the Hogwarts resistance, she realizes) stood, arms around each other, clinked their bottles of butterbeer in a toast to the rising sun—the sun they hadn't expected to see—and then waved to the crowds and shouted "Dumbledore's Army!" to thunderous applause… and then begun laughing, the sort of laughter that devolves all too quickly into weeping.

She and Ron made sure to draw off the reporters at that point, because she didn't want that on the front page of the _Prophet_, and Ron didn't either: Neville and Ginny and Luna collapsed in each other's arms, weeping like abandoned children, and what was most paradoxical of all, Luna (still thin from her captivity) with her arms around the other two, patting them as they sobbed, whether in joy at the reunion or sorrow for their dead schoolmates or simply relief that it was all over…

She never would have guessed that she and Ron would have come apart within a few months, and that she'd be hounded like a celebrity (which she was) and her life splashed across the _Daily Prophet_ to the point where she'd want to leave the whole thing behind… which she did. She'd gotten an ordinary Muggle job, wrangled with the Ministry about getting her parents back from Australia, testified in the war crimes trials… and then thankfully, the whole thing was over, except for the slow grinding of the bureaucracy.

Shortly after the trials and the break-up with Ron, she'd come home from work to find a letter from Neville, a perfectly ordinary Muggle letter, stamp and all. "I wasn't sure when to telephone," he had begun, "if you have a telephone at all."

So it had begun, with a walking tour in Lancashire, as little like any of her experiences at Hogwarts as possible. Neville's friend Andrew had told him to invite a friend "from that mysterious school of yours. It must be awfully posh because we've never heard of it." Andrew's fiancée Miranda had been delighted that Hermione was both a girl and not mad for football. Neither of them had the faintest notion of who she was. They were friendly to her because she was Neville's school friend, and then because they noticed that she liked walking quite as much as they did; by the end of the day, they were quite satisfied with the expedition and already making plans for the next, with her participation quietly assumed.

It was Neville, actually, who'd drawn her back into the wizarding world, but the quiet, behind-the-scenes aspect of it, which sat well with her, because she'd had a lifetime's worth of the glare of publicity.

It had begun on that walking tour, in a quiet moment when he'd asked how well she'd been sleeping since the war… and then told her how he and Dean Thomas, both of whom existed in the Muggle world, had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. Had she…? Well, she had, she told him; they talked about how very circumspect they'd had to be when telling the NHS doctors about their experiences; then Neville told her about his conversations with Luna and with Ginny, who needed help as much as they did, but, having lived all their lives on the other side of the border, were having trouble getting treatment.

Thus had the petition for Shacklebolt been born, and thus, by a path she never would have anticipated, had she come to this fine summer morning, drinking tea with the mother of the boy who had appointed himself her enemy at school, and now was something in the nature of a family friend.

ooo

The miniature Quidditch game amuses Hypatia, who doesn't understand yet but is fascinated by the flying figures. Several times, Hermione sees Draco's glance flicker from the Seekers to his sister and back, and she smiles at the notion that he's already grooming her for a career of Quidditch glory. If she did in fact inherit her parents' slim, light frames, and her brother's taste for competition, then she might well be a fine player—and it goes without saying that she'll have expert coaching from an early age.

William comments favorably at several clever turns of play, and Draco looks at him with a sharp, attentive glance and a bit of surprise, no doubt. It makes Hermione want to laugh, unmaliciously this time, at the idea of surprising Draco Malfoy, even though he's by no means the boy she knew under that name at school.

ooo


	19. Chapter 19

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Draco watches from the terrace as his mother and Neville Longbottom walk toward the formal gardens. His mother has her wand out, in a precautionary way, and Longbottom has a collecting box at the ready. Hermione's parents follow a few paces behind.

He stayed behind because there is the very good chance that the Horror in the formal gardens would find his baby sister a tasty morsel, given that she's about the size of a Kneazel but doesn't move nearly as fast. He tightens his hold on her, just thinking about that. No, he's not a coward, but there are some chances he is not willing to take…

… except that he is a coward, he has to admit, because there is Granger, no, Hermione, picking up each of his toys in turn and looking at them in wonderment, and then stealing little sidelong glances at him, as if to size up the little boy who had owned those toys, and he's avoiding her eyes.

She stayed behind, and there was no reason. She could have accompanied her perfectly mad fiance, or boyfriend, or whatever Longbottom is to her—it's close, certainly, because Longbottom's eyes follow her everywhere, with a kind of tender attention. They touched—accidentally, but rather a lot—as they walked through the rose garden; Draco finds himself wondering what they do behind closed doors. Have they…?

No, he's not going to ask himself that question, not with Hermione not ten paces away, smiling appreciatively at the glittering likeness of a Norwegian Ridgeback.

Hypatia wriggles against him, impatient to see what's happening; he settles her on his lap so that she's looking out at the world from the safe circle of his arms. He leans forward and lets her feather-fine blond hair tickle his face; there's the wonderful smell of _baby_, that he'd never noticed before, likely because other people's babies do not smell as nice as his baby sister. When he touches a fingertip to her silky cheek, when she smiles and reaches for him, when he feels her breathing in his arms, there are things he understands that he never did before. He realizes that he loves Hypatia as his mother loved him. Though he hopes he loves her wisely, he recognizes that he's as besotted as any doting mother.

And if there were a question of lying to Dark Lords on his little sister's behalf, he'd do it in a heartbeat…

… and (with a shiver) he thinks that if someone meant her harm, he would put himself in the way without thinking about it, and he realizes just how childishly blasphemous he had been in making fun of the death of Potter's mother. He still has no idea—he suspects that no one does—what sort of person she was, buried as she is under labels laudatory or defamatory, but in that last moment…

Hermione is looking at his Quidditch players, who are wandering across the tabletop that served as their pitch. She has an unreadable expression, and disconcertingly, she keeps looking at him, as if he were a book she wanted to read… except perhaps in a language she doesn't understand, or in a ferocious enchanted binding, like some of the grimoires in his father's library…

Finally, she puts down the toy dragon, well away from the Quidditch players, and looks at him. "Malfoy," she says.

"Granger."

The silence is thick and awkward and he isn't sure what's hiding in it. There's _something_ that wants to be said.

She walks over and sits down in the chair next to his. She's looking at him and biting her lip.

Finally she looks at Hypatia and says, "She's really quite sweet." Draco smiles before he realizes that his face is doing that, and then feels awkward. _You mean, not like me_, he thinks, but doesn't say.

Her eyes are like her mother's, sharp and observant, and she has some of the mildness of her father… yes, her father is a Presence too, just like Dr. Burgess. And like that other Muggle Healer, both of the Granger parents seem to put one at ease almost as a matter of course.

He watches his mother, a distant figure in pale broad-brimmed hat. She's at ease talking to the Granger parents, so she must feel it as well, that calm restfulness and reassurance.

The daughter is not so restful. She's always been like that, he realizes, a bristling vortex of restless energy: bossing, organizing, announcing the answers she's ferreted out of books… and now, she's sitting demurely with ankles crossed, but her foot is jiggling, and she's still biting her lower lip. He wonders if that hurts, and then thinks again about her and Longbottom kissing (what he glimpsed once in the hallway at the clinic), and wishes he hadn't…

He glances aside and catches a glimpse in one of the dim mirrors on the back wall: a boy in traditional robes, with a baby on his lap, and a girl sitting close, their features lost against the brilliant light from the gardens. … if he didn't know who they were, he'd think they were a happy couple with their baby.

That's not a picture that will come to pass in his lifetime, of course—certainly not in the expected circles. There was a time… he remembers the time, when he was fourteen, and his mother and father took him aside for the Talk, asked him who he might fancy from the acceptable families… all of whom are dead now, or far from inclined to consider him as a reasonable match.

Pansy, whom he once thought he might marry, lives in seclusion, and the word is that she's taken to drink. He passed Millicent Bulstrode in the street the last time he was in Diagon Alley, and she pretended not to recognize him. Cut him dead, right in front of his Aunt Andromeda's book shop: Millie the half-blood doesn't want to be contaminated by association with a Pureblood Heir…

Hermione looks at him, this time directly in the eyes. It's disconcerting. There's her impossible hair, that he once thought of as some wild emanation of her primitive Mugglish self: jungle-thick, flourishing kinks and curls, struck into blazing bronze where the sun catches in it. Under its wild fringe, her eyes are dark, and her nose and cheekbones and chin are all quite undistinguished… well, somewhere back there are tillers of the soil, or canny traders: something plebeian and striving and clever…

She says, "Everything's rather different now, isn't it?" He nods; that's an understatement. She adds, "It's rather pretty here."

He nods, all the requisite small talk having taken flight. He can feel her groping her way toward something important, that she isn't quite sure how to say.

She looks away to the formal gardens, where the four figures are now lost in the maze of hedges; only from time to time does he catch a glimpse of his mother's hat against the sharp green light and deep shadows of the manicured labyrinth. Her face is set in stubborn lines; whatever it is she means to say will get said, as soon as she manages to lay hands on it properly.

Hypatia wriggles and stretches toward Hermione, who smiles at her, and says, "I think she's curious about me. May I…?"

Only it's clear she has no idea how to hold babies; had she never read those books? He demonstrates and then carefully places his little sister in her arms… which brings them disconcertingly close, so that wild hair brushes his forehead.

She settles back in her chair, letting its back support her shoulders and spine, and says, "My mother asked why we were still on surnames. I said it was how it always had been." She adds, "We're not enemies, exactly."

"I should have thanked you," he says. "For what you did in the waiting room, with the Auror."

She says sharply, "She was misusing her authority. You've already had a trial and that was nasty enough in itself." She adds, "We all could live rather a long time, and I don't want to be re-fighting that war through the next century."

"Is it only a point of principle?" he asks, before he can stop himself. "Like the house elves…"

She looks at him, while keeping Hypatia's chubby little fingers out of her hair. There are two of her: the one who's thinking, and the one who's minding the baby's roving curiosity. "It's personal, I suppose. Doing the right thing _is_ personal." She smiles, but it's all awkwardness. "I never knew you well enough to dislike you."

For some reason, he suddenly wants to cry, which of course is childishness. She continues, "You were never speaking as _yourself_ when you said all those things to us. You were just looking for the thing that would get a reaction. It wasn't personal. I only hit you that one time because I was exhausted and you _would_ try to provoke me."

He says, "I'm sorry." Anything he could add to that would be little to his credit: he was a child, he was jealous, he was writhing under his father's reproaches about not being able to best a mere Muggle-born, he truly didn't understand _life and death,_ he was carelessly cruel…

She takes a firm grip around Hypatia's waist with one arm, to free the other so that she can reach across to pat his hand. "You already apologized, and I accepted. You don't have to do it over and over again, you know. It's just going to be awkward." She pauses. "It _is_ awkward. You're rather different than you were. So are we all." She smiles, a little tentatively. "They say that coming through a war makes one an adult. I'm not convinced. But if all goes well, we'll have a good hundred years to make up any difference."

He realizes that he's clasping her hand, and nodding, and compressing his mouth to keep back any stupid words, because words would be stupid at this juncture; it's only deeds that are going to make up the difference, and he's already so far in arrears. She smiles at him, and then at Hypatia, who's waving her arms and wriggling, starfish-fashion. "She's restless, like you. I'm quite curious how she'll turn out." She laughs, and squeezes his hand, and says, "For that matter, I'm curious how _we'll_ turn out. None of us are grownups yet, for all we've been pretending."

He nods, feeling his face grow hot for no reason at all, the same _lack of reason_ for which tears are prickling his nose, and releases her hand.

She looks out toward the gardens, and adds, "It does appear they've found it." He can see his mother's hat, and the wind-ruffled top of Neville's head, and there's no mistaking that there's a bounce in his step, even at this distance. "Neville will be ever so pleased, and I'm sure your mother will have a citation in his report." She frowns. "Did your mother ever consider becoming a Herbologist?"

Draco realizes that he'd never thought to ask that; he knows almost nothing of his mother's life before she was his mother. It's a thought, though, for the garden seems to be the only occupation that cheers her, just as caring for Hypatia cheers him. He might bring up the subject; even though she's right and they aren't grownups quite yet, his mother has taken to conversing with him as if he were an adult. They've discussed Hypatia's future; now they might talk about her mother's.

He doesn't realize he's been holding his breath until he exhales, and it sounds disconcertingly like a sigh. She nods, as if something has been settled, and says, "I did rather enjoy your toys. They're quite marvelous."

He says, "Thank you." He'd like to invite her to come and play with them again if she'd like, but of course they're no longer children.

ooo


	20. Chapter 20

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

It's morning in the waiting room, and various things have changed. For one thing, when Mary arrives for work, the sentinel in the black T-shirt and loose trousers of the DMLE is not Addie McConnell. There are two of them, a man and a woman.

The man is young, well under thirty, and his features are the sort that ought to add up to handsome but somehow fall short, somewhere in the region of comic; he has light-brown hair and hazel eyes and symmetrical, ordinary English looks that dispose themselves into a quizzical expression. The woman has darker brown hair, cut short in the sensible coiffure of doctors, nurses and athletes; this particular morning, it's ruffled as if she had been somewhere with restless winds just before dawn.

They introduce themselves as Octavian Diggory and Philippa Bones. Yes, Philippa confirms, kin to Jackie.

Of course, they would know about Jackie, wouldn't they.

Mary doesn't regret that she told McConnell—Addie—to resign her duties temporarily and seek help, but there's a twinge of nostalgia anyway, for those long afternoons with the strange patients coming and going, or awaiting their appointments among the accoutrements of their other lives. She has learned that all is not as it appears, and in fact those who wait in the anteroom are the very opposite of ordinary; they would call attention to themselves, in spite of their careful costumes. If she saw any of them on the street, they would be no more eccentric than any of the other oddities you see in a large city—the less so, particularly, because for the most part they are sane—but now that she knows some of the marks of the other world, she suspects she will recognize _their kind_...

… except for the sort like Granger, Thomas and Finnegan, Goldstein and Finch-Fletchley, who were born to ordinary parents and who look as if they might be students on holiday nervously awaiting their A-levels.

Arthur Weasley she did see the other day, in the queue at the British Museum. He was being discreet, but nonetheless he could not help looking pleased when he caught sight of her. She's crossed paths with him unexpectedly at various museums and libraries across London; he always has that delighted and bemused look, like a small boy at a magic show.

Diggory and Bones are brisk, and sensible, and she recognizes at once the professional manner. The morning arrivals are much the same, except that the Widow is not in evidence, and the last person to file in and check in with Granger and Longbottom is Addie McConnell, dressed this time in civilian clothes: inconspicuous black trousers, as before, but topped with a loose blouse in purplish-blue that makes her think of the faint glow of wildflowers in a meadow at dusk.

Things are altogether different, and yet the same; the new guards watch the arrivals and departures, occasionally exchanging low-toned small talk; Mary keeps her own vigil.

The Widow's son does not have the baby with him, and when Granger stops at the counter herself, Mary reads upside down the notation next to Narcissa Malfoy's name: "Appointment rescheduled due to Azkaban visit."

ooo

The Widow's son looks ill at ease, and at loose ends; Mary realizes that the baby has kept him occupied. He sits in a prim but wary posture, everything correct down to the last knife-crease in his light summer trousers and the ring—a signet?—on his pale, thin hand; he's wearing long sleeves as usual.

The others are not paying the slightest attention to him. The red-haired man and his blonde wife are reading. There's something about the shape of their books that makes her doubt that they are something she could find in a shop _on her side of the border_. The blonde girl with the radish earrings plays with a delicate arrangement of pale filament and glass beads, which she realizes belatedly is a molecular model, except it's alive, all the bright bits vibrating. Perhaps Arthur Weasley has shared some of his library books with her. Granger and Longbottom sit in their corner with the registers and talk in low voices; Longbottom has already seen to the rubber plant, which (if she credits such things) might almost seem to be beaming back at him.

The door opens, and this time the visitor is one of the Red-Headed League, and with him his girlfriend—there's no doubt of that from the way that she leans on his arm… except there is something as well, as Mary meets the girl's gaze, eyes bright and very old in a young face, and when she turns from three-quarter view Mary sees that the cheek is marred by three puckered parallel scars, like an old German dueling scar, but quite a bit rougher-edged; whatever tore her face open to the back teeth was not so thin or so sharp as a sword. She's wearing soft, faded blue jeans and a tunic that's shifting layers of translucent cloth, with a bit of shimmer to them, the sort of garment that calls attention to the body without revealing anything. From the way that she moves, slowly and with a cane, Mary would guess that the scarring winds all the way around her torso.

The red-headed brother (she sifts through her mental catalogue of Weasleys—the tall one, that would be Ron) greets Granger with a smile.

"So how did you like it?" she asks.

"Oh, mum wasn't sure what she thought, but…"

She laughs. "Your father had to be dragged out of there by main force." He nods and grins. His companion nudges him subtly, and he says, "But really, I brought Lavender…"

Granger is all business, glancing down the roster. "Yes." She checks something off with a flick of her pen, and looks up to meet the other girl's eyes. "I'm really glad you came."

"It wasn't a question before this," she says. Longbottom is on his feet before Mary even notices, inconspicuously taking the girl's arm, and asking after her health in properly general terms. She smiles up at him, with a flirtatious manner that seems to be her habitual stance to the world, and says, "As well as can be expected, I suppose."

That leaves Granger and Ron Weasley facing each other—rather awkwardly—with nothing to say now that official business has been conducted and the patient properly settled. Longbottom comes up to the desk and Mary hands him the forms and a clipboard with a pen on a dangling chain, which he takes to the girl as she sits, cradling her silver and lapis cane.

Kingsley had sent a note that there would be another wave, this the more grievously wounded or the ones who had held off seeking help. As well, they're expecting still more from the other side, some of them, like the Widow's son, with one or both parents in prison. There have been discreet inquiries about the treatment of addiction, as well. She wonders what manner of intoxicants the other world offers, or if they drown their sorrows in the ordinary fashion.

Addie is sitting in the far corner, as far as possible from Granger and Longbottom, she realizes. She's reading a magazine. From where she sits, Mary can't see the title, but it's something glossy and scandalous and very definitely this-worldly. There's definitely an echo of the Widow's son, in Addie's effortlessly erect posture and her proud, closed face.

Mary suspects that not one word of her reading is actually registering on her mind, however salacious the implications therein about actors, politicians or royals.

Granger says to her visitor, "You're looking quite well. And I'm glad you brought Lavender here."

There's a certain awkward silence, and Ron Weasley replies, "Well."

Granger says, "It's all right. It's quite all right."

He nods, a little too vigorously. "You're taking good care of them."

"Not so much me." She nods toward the doctors' office doors. "It's an excellent clinic."

He looks at the floor briefly, then says again, "Well." He adds, "Lavender told me Parvati finally persuaded Pansy to think about it." He makes a sour face. "I don't know."

Granger's manner stiffens a trifle. "We're all survivors, Ron." He's looking at the Widow's son with an expression of distaste she's seen on other faces.

He sighs, and says, "I suppose so." He's going to say something else, but Granger's quelling look apparently stops that.

He glances at the blond girl, who has done something discreetly to make the fantastical model in her hands _hum_, and says, "Luna did rather like that Muggle stuff."

For the first time, Granger smiles. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised she'd taken interest. Particle physics is even weirder than the stuff in the _Quibbler._" She smiles even more broadly. "Your father is well?"

"Oh, you know him. Cheerful ever since he got a gander at that Muggle stuff." He adds, "He even pronounces it correctly now: _electricity_."

Granger, like Mary, seems to have developed the knack of paying attention to more than one thing at a time, for she can't have seen the latest arrivals; nonetheless her face goes to _all business_ and she says, "Ron. Talk to you later?"

It's the Patil sister, the one she'd mentally nicknamed the Giggler. Her twin is the sensible one; that's the thing with twins, especially identical ones: you think they look alike, until you pay attention. She's in a Weird Sisters t-shirt and jeans and trainers, her long braid swinging behind her, as ordinary a London girl as you could wish to find; she might be a university student, on her way from the lab to the bus… except that the girl she's accompanying is far from ordinary. If the others are trying to be inconspicuous about their origins, this one dares you to think it: _witchy_ every inch of her, from her glossy black hair and kohl-lined eyes, to her jet jewelry (including a genuine Victorian hair bracelet with jet beads and silver fittings), and a dress all in black, with shifting layers of black lace, all of it provocatively diaphanous and yet, like the Lavender girl's tunic, revealing nothing even as it half-mocks you for looking.

The red-headed boy steps back with something between chivalry and distaste, leaving her a wide berth as she stops in front of the little desk attended by Granger and Longbottom.

"Not a lot to choose, is there?" she says, her lip lifting in an elegant sneer as she looks from Granger to Longbottom and back.

Parvati Patil whispers something in the girl's ear. Granger has put on her cool, professionally opaque manner, and bent her head over the register to find the name and mark it off. She indicates the front desk, and Mary has the forms ready.

The girl is young, and very striking: nothing's perfect in that face, but each feature has its charm, or rather its charisma: from the dark eyes to the short, tip-tilted nose to the lips archaically painted in a bee-stung scarlet cupid's bow that echoes the actual shape of her lips. The whole thing, from the Theda Bara bob to the black-lace-veiled decolletage to the enameled nails, screams _Bad Girl_. It's not a type Mary ever has found compelling, except from a safe distance. The kohl and the lip paint don't hide the pale, puffy look of a far too indoor life and drugs substituted for food, if the thinness of the hands didn't already give that away. The tattoo on the forearm of the Widow's son would look well with this girl's ensemble.

She finishes filling out her forms, holding the pen awkwardly and frowning—this must be another who's never _crossed the border_-and Mary sees the name: Pansy Parkinson.

In a way, this hard-edged adolescent does recall the flower with the small, intensely colored blossoms and velvety petals; well-named, she is, with her swinging curtain of glossy dark hair and her intensely red lips and a flash of green and silver satin on the shoulder of her dress, a ribbon rosette where a corsage would be. It's a badge of some sort, Mary would guess, though she has no hope of decoding its significance, not without Addie at her shoulder to interpret the other world for her.

Bones and Diggory have separated, while she wasn't looking, and they stand now, discreetly on alert, at opposite ends of the room; Addie has moved too. Is she on duty as well? Mary recognizes the configuration: they have disposed themselves to cover any part of the room, should firing commence… She has no idea what that might look like, and hopes she will not find out.

The girl looks at her, with an expression caught somewhere between defiance and contempt—the kind of adolescent attitude that usually masks something else—and then yields to her companion, who leads her to a seat carefully distant from anyone else in the room. As she passes the Widow's son, she looks him full in the face and Mary sees a look of intimate hatred blaze on her features, as if the white-hot incandescence of a blowtorch lit her whole face to passion hotter than the sun. Intimate it is, because there's a brief look of longing on his face before it closes up into his habitual look of proud self-sufficiency.

She wonders what they were to each other, _before_.

Once seated, Parkinson does exchange a look with the girl with the cane—Lavender Brown, by the forms that Longbotttom just returned to Mary's counter—who nods back; she's seen that look pass between veterans before, usually the ones with the more visible disfigurements.

Mary realizes now that the doubled guard is not on account of Addie McConnell, but for the new arrivals. The Parkinson girl is only the first. About twenty minutes later, the door opens to admit a tall, hulking fellow with blunt features and the slightly baggy look of a fat person who has lost a great deal of weight suddenly. He's also a confederate of the Widow's son, for they give each other an acknowledging nod as he goes to sit down, and behind the curtness of adolescent boys she recognizes an unspoken sadness.

The next group arrives together, and they're an odd assortment: a weedy, much-too-pale boy with dark hair and the stooped look of a scholar; a dark boy, with an Italian name and Moorish features and a silky, insinuating voice; a square-built one, with the hard look of an athlete and a manner that's simultaneously aristocratic and thuggish. The thing they all have in common is the look that they give her in passing: a sort of contemptuous curiosity, the way one might regard a monkey in a zoo.

Mary shivers, with the sense that some of Shakespeare's criminal supernumeraries, his Murderers and Assassins, have entered the room.

She checks their forms off against the register: Gregory Goyle, Theo Nott, Blaise Zabini, Marcus Flint. Their rather sad dossiers, forwarded by Kingsley, lie close at hand: fathers dead or imprisoned, mothers likewise (she shouldn't be surprised, she reminds herself, for men and women alike are combatants in their quarrels). One of the mothers is _dead of poison by an unknown hand_.

The second wave has arrived, or has begun to arrive.

ooo

**Author's note:** Special thanks to Silver Sailor Ganymede for her wonderful characterizations of Draco's Slytherin contemporaries; her Blaise, Theo and Pansy are particularly marvelous and have irrevocably changed my understanding of those characters. See my Favorites for a link.


	21. Chapter 21

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

At the end of the day, Mary looks up to see if everyone has cleared out of the waiting room, and begins the work to put the files in order.

There's always quite a bit to do at the end of a day. This last crowd was exhausting, if nothing else for the palpable atmosphere of apprehension and the doubled—or is that tripled?—guard. It would appear that Addie may be a patient, but nonetheless she is in reserve if there is an emergency.

She's putting the last of the files into place when the oddest thing happens. Through the open window, a missile appears… not seen since her own school days: a paper airplane, only this one seems to have scant respect for the laws of aerodynamics. It swoops in through the window and does a rather showy loop-the-loop before landing on her desk.

She stares at it gingerly. Plainly it came from the other world. She isn't sure if she should touch it. While she's pondering the question, it unfolds itself into a square of parchment on which the words are written in vibrant red ink:

_Mary,_

_I'm on duty until seven o'clock. Would you care to meet me at the Muggle café down the corner? It would be good to see you unofficially, and it would be my pleasure to buy you dinner. _

_Many thanks for the advice. Dr. Rosencrantz is a very skillful Healer. _

_Yours,_

_Addie _

_PS: Reply below, and it will find its way back to me._

So they are on first names, it would appear, at least from Addie's side of the transaction.

She'll be finishing the last of the files around six o'clock, so there's no point in going home first, and her work clothes aren't too conspicuous.

And as always in her post-war, post-Jackie life… Until recently, she hadn't known that there was a war, nor that Jackie was a casualty of it. She has a book in her shoulder bag. It's always good to have occupation, a specific against despair, an escape to some other world: something to while away the time while waiting.

She writes at the bottom of the letter, _I'll see you there at seven, and I'll see if I can get a booth._ As she half expected, as soon as she finishes, it folds itself back into an airplane and cruises lazily down the length of the desk, rising as it reaches the edge, then glides serenely out the window into the summer evening.

ooo

It's a curious place, the cafe around the corner; it's decorated in rather too precious Olde Englishe Quaint but the atmosphere is more in the style of a Parisian café than a London pub or restaurant. She's not the only patron sitting alone in a booth or at a table, reading a book or consulting spread-out papers as if the cafe were a study or library away from home. She sits in the booth (the second-to-last empty one), reading and sipping a mug of tea, for it's an hour at least until Addie arrives.

She's reading about the Great War… a distant sorrow, one would think, but she realizes that all of her reading has had to do with war, or loss, and it's only distant because the great river of Time has borne away those moments of horror into the blued-out distance: the irreparable wounds beyond the hope of the surgeon's knife; the hideous stench of a field hospital on the Western Front; the cut-off horizon of the future, that follows the Telegram. Brought back to life in a story, wrapped once more in living lineaments, their shock is fresh and undiminished.

Then a voice cuts through the pleasant hubbub of overlapping conversations, a voice familiar from brief acquaintance, though what pulls her back to wakefulness through the layers of lucid dream, through the veil of print, is the note of pain.

It's voice of the Widow's son, on the other side of the partition, in the next booth.

"But you never wrote," he says, as if defending himself against unjust accusation.

The girl's voice that answers him is just as scornful as her looks—ah yes, the pale and witchy Pansy of the jet-black hair and the jewelry to match—and her accent quite as patrician as his. "Oh, I wrote, Draco. I wrote. Your mother must have hidden the letters, or burned them."

He says, "But I never knew…"

"Well, you might have thought to _suspect._" There's a very distinct chink of cup against saucer, not as soundless and ladylike as she would have expected. "You didn't think to cast a contraceptive charm, did you? After all, you were only _seeking comfort, _and it was all right because we were practically betrothed, and they'd told us …"

"They'd told us rather a lot of lies," he says, with more heat than she's yet heard in his voice, which is usually languid and drawling. "I would have… if I'd known."

"Oh, that's a fat lot of use to me now," she says.

"If it's mine…"

"Oh, 'if it's yours'… how _dare_ you, Draco. Do you suppose I had _time,_ let alone inclination, to have been with anyone but you?"

"You won't let me finish anything. I was going to say, I would marry you. For the sake of our child…"

"Well, that's rather too late to know."

"You didn't-"

"I didn't do _anything_." She's near tears but still bearing up, as Mary can tell from the strain in her voice. "I was in hiding. Most anyone wanted nothing to do with the girl who'd been ready to sell out Potter, no matter any number of them would have done the same." She adds with some venom, "At least you've got a mother, and she looks out for you, too, so you don't get letters from _contaminating influences_ while you're trying to look helpless and innocent on the witness stand: 'Oh I was only a Death Eater because they held me at wand-point'… when I remember you _bragging_ on it. You make me sick, Draco Malfoy. I wouldn't marry you if you were the last wizard on earth."

"Pansy." No answer. "Pansy, what happened to our child?"

"It's dead." She added, "And the Healer was quite nasty about it. It only lived three days." The tension in that voice is dry-eyed, the desert heat having long ago mummified the sorrow in question. "She said that the Muggles had a name for it. 'Fatal genetic defect.'" She pronounces the phrase as if it were foreign, which to her no doubt it is.

She continues, "She said that if I wanted to have children who weren't freaks or Squibs, I'd best try my luck with a Muggle-born, or given what we've made of our blood-lines, a full Muggle." Her voice shakes with indignation. "She said it wouldn't do to be having to do with my cousin; our ancestors already did for us in that regard."

There's nothing from his side but a soft, wet, strangled sound, as if he were choking on something. For a moment she wonders if she should abandon her inadvertent eavesdropping and attend to him, for seconds count when the airways are blocked…

His voice recovers itself. "If you want, I'll complain…"

She laughs, a short cold bark with sneer in it. "I don't think so. Your father's name doesn't carry a lot of weight at St. Mungo's these days. She never would have dared, before the war."

"Pansy, I would marry you…"

"Much good it would do me to be Pansy Malfoy. It would only change one ruined name for another." She says, "Your bitch of a mother wouldn't allow it in any case."

"Don't bring my mother into this."

"Oh, I didn't bring her into it. She was in it from the start. And if she thinks everything's going to be just jolly and fine, because she's hiding out at the Manor, … well, she can think again. Some of us remember. The 'bloody unsinkable Malfoys,' that's what Millie calls your lot. I heard her talking to Tracey Davis in the Leaky Cauldron." She pauses, and the silence is angry, nearly as much as her voice when she speaks again. "Half-blood cows. They're doing just _fine._ Tracey's engaged to Theo Nott, and he's pitifully grateful. It's clear enough who'll have the whip hand going forward."

She adds, "Do you know what that Healer had the cheek to tell me? That there had been a rumor for years that your mother was Abraxas Malfoy's natural daughter, and anyone with a jot of common sense would have reason to suspect that, given the lack of blondes in the Black line. She said a _Muggle_ would have suspected that."

"I'll _kill_ her." For the first time, Mary thinks about the emblem on his arm, because that cold hiss of fury sounds like the voice of a would-be assassin.

"You'll do no such thing, unless you want to be sharing a cell with your dear pater in Azkaban. I asked that Muggle healer was it true, about cousins marrying, and she said yes." She takes a breath and continues, "Even if I _wanted_ to marry you, we're not fit." Her voice breaks, and with it the rhythm of her breathing, and then there's a sob in her voice as she says, "I did want to have children, and now there's no hope."

He replies, so low that Mary barely hears him, "I did too, Pansy. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

There's a chink of crockery, as the plates and cups in the next booth are moved aside, and then quick, discreet nose-blowing. Even the gentry must attend to that, Mary thinks sardonically, and then realizes it's one of Jackie's thoughts. Jackie's gone, but with her, and always will be, as long as she hears Jackie's voice in her head, commenting on the passing scene.

She looks up in time to see them leave. The girl slides gracefully out of the booth, black-lace draperies settling around her, to stand with her head held high; the boy offers his arm with old-fashioned courtesy, and after the pause of a breath or two, she takes it. As they leave together, more than one head turns to watch them pass. For all that neither is particularly beautiful, they're a striking couple: nearly the same height, jet-black hair and pale-blond, her black lace sleeve against his crisp white cotton one.

It's just as well, Mary thinks, because she wouldn't like to see them crossing paths with Addie in the wide world, neither for their sakes nor for Addie's.

ooo

Addie McConnell is a woman of her word, for at precisely five minutes after seven, she appears in the doorway of the café, looking discreet and ordinary and utterly in place; Mary seeks her eyes to find Addie already looking at her.

She slides into the booth across from Mary, and looks at the book she's put to one side.

"About one of our wars," Mary says. "The one that ended in 1918."

"Within living memory," Addie says, "not so long ago." She smiles, but it's both sad and mordant. "They never do end, anyway." She looks at Mary, and adds with some determination, "Unless we make an effort."

Mary smiles back, and hands her the menu.

ooo

**Author's note: **Did I mention Silver Sailor Ganymede, queen of the Slytherin vignette? If you love Pansy and Blaise and Theo and Tracey and Millie and Greg and the rest, see my Favorites for a link both to her page and to my favorites among her work. Her Blaise is perfection itself, and I keenly regret that he will have a briefer role here than in her oeuvre.


	22. Chapter 22

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Mary Esmond looks across the table at Addie McConnell, who is reading the menu with downcast eyes, scanning the selections and frowning. She looks up finally, and says, inconsequentially, that she quite likes this place.

It's neither one nor the other, not London or Paris or yet Disneyland, betwixt and between, a shadow gate to _somewhere else,_ though mostly it's the world on the other side of the patrons' opened novels. There's a pub in London, not far from King's Cross…

Mary knows about that pub, because Jackie mentioned it in passing once, but she lets Addie continue.

It's the gate to the other world, the one that Addie inhabits, the one into which she was born. That world intersects with her own, the daylight world, in curious places and various ways. There's an omnibus that traverses the towns of Great Britain _in alphabetical order,_ there's a train that runs from London to a place in the Scottish mountains that's not really a place, there's an invisible railway station, and a magical platform at King's Cross…

Mary says, at length, the thing that a sensible person would say: "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because it's not approved, you know."

Mary isn't sure what she means.

"What we're doing."

"Is it a matter of two women? Jackie's Aunt Amelia didn't have a problem with that."

"Well, Jackie was a Squib, so there wasn't a question of the Line, really. It's that I'm a witch…"

"… and I'm one of the others." She doesn't like the sound of that word: _muggle._ It has overtones of stupidity, and stubborn attachment to ignorance, and thuggishness. Brutally she adds, "And you're Jackie's bodyguard. Or _were._ And now you're one of the patients at my clinic."

Addie nods, barely flinching. "They told me there was nothing I could have done. It was Lestrange, after all." She says, "It's not approved, usually, but Kingsley told me that he thought quite highly of you. Hermione Granger said the same."

"The Sergeant."

Addie's face is blank with incomprehension for a moment, and then she begins to laugh. "Oh, that's funny. She is, isn't she?" She asks, almost flirtatiously, "So what nicknames do you have for the rest of us?"

She tells the names, the ones she's told before and the others: the Black Widow, the Rock Star (which requires a lengthy aside on the history of rock-n-roll in the British Isles and America), the Sergeant of course, the Widow's son… She tells the fantastical thought she had, seeing those two names in the register: Percy Weasley and Narcissa Malfoy.

Addie bursts out laughing. "Oh, my. That _would_ be a match. I would _pay _to watch that courtship."

The Army of Lovers.

At that, Addie's face falls, and she looks as if she's going to cry. She's remembering her friend, Mary knows, the friend who possibly was more than a friend…

… and Jackie's Aunt Amelia, who was one of her heroes: Amelia with her monocle and her redingote and her boots, old-fashioned cavalry boots…

No. Not cavalry boots, but a very specific sort of boot you wore when _flying._ No, not as in _aviatrix_ but as in _witch, witch riding a broomstick._

"An army of lovers cannot fail," Mary repeats, very softly, but Addie hears her nonetheless, and reaches across the table to take her hand.

"That's what the old man said, they told me," she says. "'The power he knows not.'"

Mary doesn't need to be told who _he_ was: the ferocious generalissimo of the opposing forces, the dictator-mage who mobilized the secret army that branded the skull-and-snake tattoo like a burn mark on the skinny arm of the Widow's son; who mobilized the Widow's husband, the torturer with the face of ice; who called forth the windstorms not seen in a hundred years, who sank the British Isles in a cold torpor of depression and fear that even they… _the muggles_ … could feel.

The witches and wizards have been at war, contesting the ground across England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, with extraordinary forces…

… no different from us, she thought, who can summon the forces of the atom, crack open the grey-metal skin of a warhead to hatch an earthbound sun over an enemy city.

"And yet we're only human," she says, stubbornly. The details in those files are no different, at heart, than those of the ordinary patients: the nightmares, the unexplained fury and tears, the lack of concentration. Across the border, there's a whole generation of schoolchildren who cannot concentrate well enough to take their qualifying exams.

A whole hidden world, so well hidden and for so long, that their stock no longer brings forth viable offspring (she remembers the cold fury and grief of black-haired Pansy, the ex-fiancee of the Widow's son).

Addie nods. "I think they're rethinking the rules, just now." She looks down. "There are the ones who leave, you know… I had three sisters I never met. Squibs all, like your Jackie."

"What happened to them?"

"Some families foster them out. Arthur and Molly Weasley had a Squib son, they say, and her second cousin is one too. Adrian Prewett. He's a chartered accountant." She looks down. "And they say that the Malfoys bury theirs in that white rose garden at their Manor." She says, "The McConnells foster theirs out, or that's what they gave me to understand at the Ministry. Kingsley told me that he'd help me find them." She adds, "I hope they're as happy as your Jackie was."

ooo

The last of the late-summer evening is fading over the formal gardens as Draco pours himself a glass of firewhiskey and stands to drink it, feeling like an impersonation of his father. He can't shake that feeling, any time he is standing where his father would stand. His mother is late coming back from her visit to Azkaban, and he knows that it's irrational to worry; after all, she's ringed about with the heaviest security that wizarding Britain can bring to bear.

Even though the Dementors no longer claim the island fortress as their domain, it still is not customary to permit visitors to remain overnight.

His mother is late coming back from Azkaban, _with his baby sister._

The air is caressingly warm, but he's chilled to the bone, and the firewhiskey doesn't touch it. He's worried about his baby sister, who (if Pansy and her Healer are right) might well be a Squib.

The burning in his sinuses gives him a reason for the tears welling up in his eyes, as he remembers Madam Granger talking about her shock at Hermione's early wild magic. She casually assumed that he'd have that challenge as well… because Hypatia would be a formidable witch.

She might not, after all.

His mother has gone to visit his father. She is permitted this, as he is not, because she does not bear the Mark. Pansy spoke truly; he'd bragged on it, lying sprawled like a pasha, his head in her lap and her cool, soothing fingers stroking his hair.

He knows it's useless to claw at his left forearm, much as his fingers itch to do that.

ooo

It's two glasses of firewhiskey later that he finally feels warm, and there's the reassuring _crack_ of Apparition as his mother appears just below the terrace, accompanied by the usual two Aurors. She smiles and bows to them as if they were two beaux who had been paying her attentions at a ball, and not the bodyguards appointed by the Ministry because absolutely everyone hates the Malfoy family: if it's not the ones like McConnell who lost relatives to his father's Death Eater career, then it's the families of his father's colleagues who, like Pansy, have lost more than he has and blame their erstwhile leader for the defeat of Voldemort.

She glides up the steps of the terrace with her soundless tread, Hypatia nestled against her breast, sound asleep. A baby who can sleep through Apparition when she's tired enough—that's his baby sister. A real witch, no matter what his malicious ex-girlfriend might hint.

She smiles at him. "Draco, dear, I didn't expect you to wait up for me."

He leans in and gives her a ceremonial kiss on the cheek, and she wrinkles her nose. "You've been drinking."

"Only a glass or two," he says, "and I'll remind you I've been of age for two years."

Nonetheless, she lets him take Hypatia into his arms, and smiles as he kisses the baby through the corona of pale fine hair that obscures her scalp. She says, "Your father is in good spirits, _considering._" She shakes her long hair back, as if shedding a ghostly veil. "He's pleased at your sister's progress."

He says, "I saw Pansy Parkinson today."

She turns, drawing her cloak about her. "Oh."

"She says that she sent letters, at the time of the trials."

He'd forgotten, of course, that his mother can turn to white marble like this, which is to say the cool, pale, immovable pillar against which one can throw all one's forces without effect. Or perhaps he remembered, and that's why he's had two glasses of firewhiskey, no, three. The first was only prologue.

"She bore a child, she says. A child that ought to have been a Malfoy child."

Narcissa says, "I spoke with the Healer about that."

"Which one? The one at St. Mungo's who delivered the baby?"

"No. Dr. Burgess gave me … a referral." She looks at him now for the first time, and in the faint light from the house, her eyes are bright and cold as the stars just showing in the young evening. "I know about what happened to that baby. She wrote about that, too."

"You never let me have the letters."

"It wouldn't do, not during the trials, and it certainly won't do now." She adds, "Never mind what your father would have thought on the matter; things have changed. We don't have much time. Scarcely less than a generation."

She seats herself, majestically, in one of the chairs on the terrace. "I don't think it prudent to attempt any longer to perpetuate the Malfoys as a Pureblood line." Her face is all marble serenity, but her fingers are twining around each other in her lap, a restive Black mannerism (though when Bellatrix would do that, it was only a momentary twitch before she'd reach for her wand). "Your Aunt Andromeda had words with me on the question, as well. She said it was long since time to tell you."

He cradles Hypatia against his chest and wraps his cloak around them both, to shield her from the evening chill, though really, there's no shelter from the ice-water creeping through his veins. Absent any Dementors whatsoever, his heart feels as if it's frozen in his chest, and he's breathing the atmosphere of some other planet, some poisonous miasma that freezes his lungs.

He says, "Pansy said she wouldn't have me if I were the last wizard on earth."

As if she had not heard him, she continues, "You asked me once when you were five, if you could have a little brother or sister." She says, "I believe it was after the Greengrass girls were here… and you were enchanted with little Astoria."

"I have a sister now," he says, feeling the irony of it. In place of the baby Pansy bore for him, the child he unknowingly abandoned, he has his little sister, who may be a Squib.

"There were five others before you." Utterly still, now, except for the long fingers wrapping around each other, like pale spiders or the hands of the restless dead. She sits a little straighter, raises her head, with that pale lovely hair falling down her back. "Three Squibs, one stillborn, and one who lived four hours and had seven fingers on each hand."

She adds, with a smile that's bitter and sardonic as a death's-head, "If it weren't completely out of the question socially, I'd open negotiations with Miss Granger's parents."

He frowns. "She's all but betrothed to Longbottom. There's no question of a marriage contract, and her parents would tell you that you were living in the Middle Ages. And she's _Muggle-born._"

"That's the point, Draco. None of the Muggle-borns would have us, not to mention the Half-bloods…" She adds, "Andromeda's late husband's brother has a daughter of marriageable age. Perhaps we should introduce you. It's the nearest we have to a _family connection._"

Draco frowns, mentally traversing the family tree. "Ted Tonks. Muggle-born. But he didn't have a brother."

"Not a brother who was a _wizard._"

ooo

**Author's note: **For the history of the Weasleys' Squib child, see 'The red haired boy' by Arielmoonstar, on my Favorites.


	23. Chapter 23

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

When Draco wakes, the moon is high and its silvery, colorless light throws deep-black shadows: they hide the figures in the Persian carpet on the floor, the roses in their vase, the deep high ceiling of his room… and his first thought is for Hypatia, who might not be safe.

"Three Squibs, one stillborn, and one who lived four hours and had seven fingers on each hand."

Being a Squib isn't fatal in itself. What happened to his three older siblings? (He doesn't even know if they're brothers or sisters.)

The night before, assisted into the arms of sleep by three glasses of firewhiskey, he hadn't woken until just before dawn. Now it seems he never will sleep again, for it lacks half an hour of midnight, and he's wide awake.

Three Squibs, and his mother will not say what happened to them.

It's women's business, men's business, something the grownups don't discuss in front of the children.

He wanted to scream that he _is _a grownup now, he's foster-father to his baby sister; didn't she say so herself…?

He doesn't want to wake Hypatia, so instead he whispers it, in a low hoarse voice that hurts his throat. He feels the tears coming on, because he suspects the answer.

No, it wasn't his mother who bound him to his duties as foster-father. It _was_ his mother who hid from him the letters from Pansy, for reasons of _political necessity,_ so she said, for the sake of the Line and the House and indeed his own future outside of Azkaban.

As if it would have made a difference, actually… it was Potter's testimony that had saved him, and Kingsley Shacklebolt's determination that the sins of the father would _not_ be visited on the son. Pansy might be vilified for what she said about handing over Potter to Voldemort, but she was not a defendant in the war crimes trial.

What makes him most ashamed about the whole business with Pansy is that he barely remembers it. Only the flash of warmth, her hands on his face, her dry lips on his—a little rough because it was winter, or early spring (which are much the same at Hogwarts, particularly that year), and they were chapped—and her thighs grasping him about the hips… that he remembers, tender skin against skin, warmth and softness under the scratchy veil of her layers of black lace… for it was furtive, his robes pushed up and hers draped over them by way of cover…

He remembers much better the fear, and the sense of temporary respite. In the dark of the night, he weeps because all the while that he's been trying to do right by family, by his mother's child, he unknowingly abandoned his own, condemned it to death. (No, he knows that's not the literal truth, but that's how it _feels._)

He realizes that he doesn't even know if it were a boy or a girl. Pansy didn't tell him.

The child who never would have lived more than a few days… has no sex, in death. Just like his Squib siblings, and the stillborn, and the short-lived, malformed one: only "it," the way that an unsuccessful attempt is "it." Without sex, without name. Except that even in death, Pansy's child ought to have borne his name, the name of the line from which it was fathered.

And he'd never properly paid attention to Pansy either, for she'd always been there, from the time he was four years old. He's not sure if he can say that he loved her, just as he doesn't give that name to his feeling for his mother or his father, because they have been there since the founding of the world.

It's only with Hypatia that he has come to use that word: because she is something new in the world, and she is _his_, blood of his blood and bone of his bone, the same stuff as he. They have the same mother and the same father, though he has proudly stepped in to be the foster-father. When Andromeda spoke that title, she had his assent before he even spoke it.

That cold, and fear, still grips his heart as he thinks about the conversation with his mother.

There is no warmth, no respite: anything at all might happen to his little sister if she doesn't measure up. What truly matters is enforced by binding vows, and his mother will not or cannot speak of the agreement. It's women's business, or men's business; it's something not spoken in front of the children, and to her he's a child. He remembers the things he learned in that courtroom, that come back to him now that he is not paralyzed with fear for his own fate: that she blackmailed Severus Snape into the Unbreakable Vow, to protect him on his mission of assassination; that she lied to the Dark Lord; that she gave him her wand so that he would be armed, and then did not hesitate to charge unarmed into the maelstrom of the Battle of Hogwarts in search of him.

He is his mother's treasure, but she never will tell him the truth. All of that was hidden from him.

However, there are other sources of information, who might speak frankly to him.

ooo

It's midnight, and he's standing in Diagon Alley, at the doorway that leads to the little flat over Flourish & Blott's, or rather, the little side-room that's the premises of Andromdeda Tonks, bookseller and purveyor of Muggle novelties.

He rings the bell, and waits.

After a few minutes, she comes down the staircase with a book in one hand, her fingers still holding the place.

(He glimpsed the title: _Middlemarch_, by George Eliot. Muggle, of course: only Muggles have time and leisure to write such fat books. All made up, so he understands, conjured out of empty air. His aunt insists that Muggles do magic quite regularly, between the covers of books.)

She's weary but patient with him, and she has the strangest air of having _expected_ his visit. When she sees that he's carrying Hypatia, she smiles indulgently and strokes the baby's curled fist with one long forefinger. The smile is melancholy, or perhaps it's the look in her eyes.

He's surprisingly frank with her: he's come to see her in her capacity as family rebel, and because he is so seized with fear that he cannot sleep. Anything at all might happen to his little sister. He needs to know the whys and wherefores, and whence to expect the danger.

ooo

By lamplight, in her tiny kitchen, Andromeda's resemblance to Bellatrix shows in the dramatic bone structure and the heavy-lidded, deep-set eyes, but is negated by the dress and the manner. She's wearing a dressing-gown of Muggle cut, over what he understands are Muggle men's pyjamas, and her hair, dark only by contrast with her pale skin, is looped in a heavy plait over one shoulder.

He asks the question plainly, "What happens to Squibs?" He's heard Granger remarking to Longbottom that wizards don't do statistics, but he does have some notion of the gambler's logic; the things that his mother has told him do not bode well for Hypatia.

At first Andromeda hedges, and says she never came to that part, never was initiated into the blood vows of a Pureblood marriage contract. By traditional standards, she is not in fact a daughter of the House of Black.

He contradicts her, fearlessly: she must be such, because she acknowledges him as her nephew, and she bound him to his duty as a foster-father.

No, she corrects, she offered it as an option, and it was not binding. He was the one who chose.

Her sister acknowledges her, he adds.

No, it's rather the other way around. But Cissy has no one left, and you don't abandon your little sister to her fate no matter how many bad decisions have led her there.

He says that he agrees on that, and he can say the same of his own little sister. He can't guard her from danger if he can't sleep, and he needs to know whence the danger will come. No one has told him anything.

There's a silence, and he has the inescapable feeling that she's been testing him, and that he's passed the test.

She tells him that she did receive some warning in advance. From cousin Callidora, as it happens, the one who writes the gardening and household magic books, the one who used to have the gardening column in the _Daily Prophet_.

The one who suspected, before she did herself, that she was in love with Ted Tonks.

ooo

Her voice is reminiscent as she sets the scene for him: summer, the long warm summer of her sixteenth year; Cissy was fourteen, and Lucius had begun paying court, after his fashion, watching in admiration as Cissy and Bella circled each other in the disused ballroom, hour on hour, at their dueling practice; afterward, with stiff formality, Lucius invited Cissy to promenade the formal gardens with him. The Lestrange brothers were courting Bella, though she had not chosen. Andromeda watched the whole thing in fascination. She's been a watcher all her life.

Something about the way she says it makes it a title: she's been a Watcher all her life.

Cousin Callidora was visiting, because her _woman friend_ had a cottage nearby. Of course, Andromeda adds parenthetically, the _woman friend_ was Callidora's real marriage; Harfang Longbottom was her cover, as she was his. And then there were the greenhouses, which they both loved.

(It's a measure of Andromeda's alienation from Pureblood ways, that she speaks plainly about cousin Callidora. Draco knows it, as everyone knows it, but he winces at the _bad form_ of putting it into words.)

Callidora drank tea with Druella, and watched the girls at their dueling, and smiled at Andromeda as she watched. After tea, as Druella went to chaperone Cissy and Lucius in the gardens, she'd spoken, rather offhandedly.

"You'll be well shut of it," she said. Years later Andromeda realized that _it…_was the whole Pureblood way of life, though Callidora didn't spell that out in so many words. "It won't be easy, but at least you'll be able to keep your children… however they might turn out."

Andromeda was more than surprised, because she hadn't been listening, really, but lost in reverie—oddly enough, day-dreaming about the funny Muggle-born boy with whom she'd been flirting (and rather more) those last months at Hogwarts. Callidora had laughed, in that canny, grown-up way that was more than annoying.

"He's not one of ours, is he?"

She had to ask Callidora, how it was she came to _that_ conclusion: that it was a question of a boy, and a Muggle-born boy at that.

"Because you and your little sister are wearing the _very same expression._ And I would know if you'd taken a Pureblood beau, now wouldn't I?"

She didn't deny it, of course, because she was more interested in what else Callidora had said. "What did you mean, that I would be able to keep my children?"

"Not that it's likely a Muggle-born would father Squibs on you, but even if he did… you'd be under no obligation." Callidora looked up, at the distant gardens where Cissy and Lucius were visible, intermittently, as flashes of blond hair between dark hedges. "Now your sister, she'll have it easier than you, but only on the surface of things."

Callidora was no Seer, but one didn't need prophetic powers; for a daughter of the House of Black and a son of the House of Malfoy, the path was already laid out. That summer, the joint petition of Druella Black and Abraxas Malfoy was working its way through the Wizengamot. By the time that Cissy boarded the Hogwarts Express to begin her fourth year, she and Lucius would be formally betrothed.

Draco frowns; there's so much left _out_ of this tale, for all the revelations.

Andromeda pours him another measure of firewhiskey and pulls down a large, dusty book from the shelf. It's an album of photographs; she turns the stiff pages until she's found what she seeks, and wordlessly places the album in front of him.

There is his mother, splendid in her sunlit beauty, oddly enough wearing a head-scarf pulled forward to shade her face like a cowl; there's a plump, contented blond toddler on her lap, who must be him…

… and a skinny little girl with blue hair who monopolizes him, in the next picture; and then in the next, he's tottering after her on his chubby little legs as she shoulders her broom. In the next picture, he's sitting astride the broom in front of her, as she puts his hands on the shaft in the correct position.

He looks up from the pictures to Andromeda's expectant face. "She only met you once, but she wanted to take you home," she says with a smile. He frowns. "Nymphadora. Cissy was _so_ envious, and the First War had just finished, and I couldn't resist rubbing it in a bit, because I had a daughter who was magical from the moment she was born, and Cissy… well, she'd put in an appearance to show you off."

Draco feels the coldness in his stomach, again, in spite of the warming liquor. "She told me there were five before me."

Andromeda nods. "Every one died at the age of three, except for the ones who didn't make it that far." She looks at him. "In a traditional house, they wouldn't have told you until your wedding night. But that's why you came to see me, isn't it? Age three. You won't have to worry about it until she's three, and then only if she hasn't shown any sign of magic."

"And if that happens…?" He still can't say it aloud: _if she's a Squib…_

"Before her third birthday, we'll be sure you and Hypatia are _elsewhere._" She says, "Cissy asked me if I'd help her _honor the contract,_ and I told her my name wasn't Malfoy, or Black either."

Draco nods.

"You're the foster-father. There's no obligation on you. Your mother, on the other hand…"

It makes him sick, to realize that for the first time in his life he's afraid of his mother.

"…she'll do her duty, even if it breaks her heart."

ooo

He sits a while in silence, considering that. Once, he would have hearkened to that word, "duty," but he's taken on too many duties so-called that have left him with nightmares and the taste of ashes.

Then, as if to change the subject, he asks what she knows of her late husband's brother's daughter.

She frowns. "My husband only had one brother." He nods, as if to say, _yes, I know he's not a wizard._ "He runs a pub in London. His daughter…" and now she's looking at him, "…his daughter will take over the place, like as not, when he retires." Her frown gives way to an expression more definitely quizzical, and then something in his face incites her, and she begins to laugh. "Oh, dear. Oh, my. When Cissy kicks over the traces she does it with a vengeance. Surely not…"

He's annoyed now, because she's treating it as a joke at his expense. "So who is she? And how old is she?"

"Just about your age… eighteen? Nineteen? She's a Muggle, of course, but she does know our ways. Nymphadora corrupted her, fairly thoroughly… as if her father hadn't already." She smirks. "Eddie and Ted paid for the pub, you know, with his World Cup winnings…" She adds, unnecessarily, "Quidditch, mind you. Not football."

He says, "My mother wants an introduction." His humiliation is complete, but perhaps his rebel aunt can help him forestall the last of it.

He can't look at her as he adds, "For the sake of the family."

His mother wants to marry him off to his cousin-by-marriage, whom he's never met, who's a Muggle, and he's not the Heir of the House of Malfoy but its breeding stock, and he's woefully flawed. Pansy won't have him on that account. Either of them, on their own, might be able to _try their luck elsewhere,_ as that Healer so crudely put it, but together, they're deadly.

And then there's the present matter… Draco feels the breathing weight of Hypatia asleep against his chest, and wishes he himself could return to childhood.

"About the Squibs," he says, "do you _really_ know, or is it only rumor?"

Andromeda looks at him, eyes dark in their sockets, and there's a chill in the room as Bellatrix Lestrange is momentarily resurrected in her cold, erect posture and look of fire and steel.

When finally she speaks, it's slowly, in a low voice, as if there still were someone who might overhear.

They had compared notes as adults, she and her cousin Sirius, and what they'd put together from things overheard in the men's and the women's quarters led her to believe that it was true: that certain great Pureblood Houses did in fact cull their Squibs in the most literal sense possible, that no child survived beyond the age of three who did not demonstrate unmistakable magical ability.

What's more, Sirius had seen the great ledgers in his father's library, on the sly as always; if he hadn't had _help,_ a borrowed aid he wouldn't specify, he'd have been seen reading them.

His face had been white as a sheet, and his eyes wide, when he'd told her what was written into her sisters' marriage contracts.

The House of Black cut off their Squibs, but the Lestranges and the Malfoys _culled_ theirs.

ooo

It's past two in the morning, and he can't settle into sleep. Everything in his room stares back at him, malevolently, the roses and the Persian rug accusing: _are you a traitor to the House of Malfoy? _He thinks of his dead and disowned cousins, Nymphadora who wanted to adopt him and Sirius who read the family ledgers on the sly, and envies them their freedom. They didn't care that they were traitors, or (in Nymphadora's case) both nonexistent and a bastard.

Hypatia is sleeping soundly, but he takes her up, and walks as if he were trying to soothe her into sleep, when it's himself he's trying to lullaby with the reassuring thought that all will be well.

He's the only one of the first six who survives. What are Hypatia's chances?

Now he wants to take up Granger's suggestion that he take her to a Muggle Healer for examination; if she's a perfectly healthy baby, even if a Squib, then she could pass for a Muggle, couldn't she? And what would be the harm of that?

His mother.

His mother won't permit it. She's done for all the others, so why not this one?

Because if she lets it go in this case, if she lets a Squib live, then she'll remember that the others didn't survive… and in any case, she's likely compelled.

ooo

It's past three in the morning, closer to four, when he materializes in the quiet street outside the Granger house. Light shines from the kitchen windows. It's probably Hermione, having breakfast, because she wakes every morning at this time.

The morning air is cool, August mellowing into September, and he remembers the bustling crowds at King's Cross on the first of September; _all those Muggles_ you have to dodge to get to Platform Nine and Three Quarters. All those Muggles. He has a cousin-by-marriage who's a Muggle, the daughter of a publican, and that's the best marriage prospect he has at present.

He's about to ring the bell when he hears the voices through the open window: a man and a woman, conversing in low tones and laughing. At first he thinks it must be the Granger parents, for the woman's voice is in the right register to be Madam Granger… except that the man's accent is wrong, no, it's all warm round vowels and swallowed consonants, what would be lilting and musical if it weren't just wrong—certainly not William Granger's carefully correct, BBC news-reader's version of the Queen's English.

It's not Madam Granger, but her daughter.

And the man is Neville bloody Longbottom.

And what they're saying to each other he doesn't want to hear.

He can't help looking in the window, though, and indeed it is Hermione Granger and Neville Longbottom, and they're both sunburnt—well, Neville's always sunburnt, in a patch across the nose when he's forgotten his gardener's hat. His scars show livid on his cheekbones through his darkened skin…

… and Hermione is bronzed, a dark beauty, copper showing in her hair and gold in her complexion and for the first time he wonders whence hail her ancestors, the Mediterranean or the Levant or perhaps even the West Indies. Her hair flies around her face like a mane, and she's made no attempt to bind it or slick it down; her sleeveless blouse is slipping down her shoulder, and her legs are bare. She's as wild as a Muggle, but she's a _witch,_ oh god, a real witch, his own kind, but he can't have her, it's a _social impossibility,_ and besides she's not interested in him, but in _Neville Longbottom_ of all people.

It wouldn't taste quite so bitter if she were with Harry, for he's more than inured to being humiliated by Harry.

Neville and Hermione are laughing, because apparently they walked in on her parents… well, in other than a parental aspect, and they're both uneasy, and it's better to pretend that it's amusing than to admit… well, it's better to have Apparated home, which apparently they did, having left the elder Grangers to their amours in the holiday spot somewhere on the Mediterranean. (Draco hadn't even known that they'd gone on holiday.)

They're sitting on the couch, under the civilized lamplight, both in shorts and sandals and bare legs… he stares, which isn't right, because bare legs are definitely not a proper Pureblood manner of dress, and there are two pairs of them—hers, sturdy and muscular and his, the same on a rather larger scale… and Neville has drawn her down on his lap and she's laughing and kissing him, her unfastened sandal dangling from one toe, his hand on her knee.

_You'll be able to keep your children, however they might turn out._

He hates them, and envies them, with a ferocity he hasn't felt since Hogwarts, when Potter turned down his overtures of friendship, when Slytherin was cheated out of the House Cup… so much emotion he spent, as a child, on such childish things, not knowing that he was rehearsing the adult hatreds of an exiled prince.

He can't go home, for the Manor itself accuses him, and he can't go back to Diagon Alley; his aunt has spoken her piece and retired for the night. He wraps his cloak about him and casts a warming charm for Hypatia's sake, and shivers less from the early-morning chill than from the thought that he came here for reassurance, and it isn't going to be offered. Hermione Granger is not her mother, who is kind to him because she doesn't know him. If he rang the doorbell just now, Hermione would be polite, and irritated, and wish the whole time that he would go away.

Hypatia sleeps against his chest, her chubby fist shoved in her mouth. It's a long time until she's three, and he trusts Andromeda, but for the moment, the danger seems immediate and the night both long and cold. He hasn't any idea what to do now, except to sit still and try not to weep like an abandoned child. He hasn't any right to that role, not with Hypatia trusting him to keep her safe.

He hasn't succeeded in keeping calm enough, for she starts, and wakes. For a brief moment, she stares at him with her bright grey eyes before she starts to cry, a thin wail that isn't hunger but fear.

Then there's Longbottom's voice asking what that is outside, and then the door opens, and Granger says in a voice that is trying to be polite and failing, "Malfoy. It's four o'clock in the morning. Why are you skulking about _again?"_

"People don't _skulk_ with babies," Longbottom says, quite reasonably, which makes Draco hate him even more than he hates Granger. "I think something's the matter." And then with the warm, capable manner that he recognizes as _utterly professional,_ Longbottom and Granger between the two of them have him on his feet, and into the front room.

Hypatia is still crying, but somewhat less urgently, which is a relief to Draco because if Longbottom succeeded in getting her to calm down when he can't, he would find it in himself to kill the duffer on the spot.

ooo


	24. Chapter 24

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

It's four o'clock in the morning, and they're alone in the front room of her parents' house, feeling like teenagers for the first time in the post-war.

Hermione can feel the rough places on Neville's palms where they have calluses from his work in the greenhouses; the careful touch of his fingertips raises rather delicious shivers along her nerves.

And then there's the mutual laughter, which is both awkward and sexy, because they don't want to mention what they saw, that both embarrassed and roused them, and then there are the kisses. Hermione might have speculated about how some of the boys at school would kiss (well, that would be Ron) but Neville had not been among that number. These last months, it's been a pleasant surprise to discover that he's as attentive and careful at that as at any of the other things at which he once was clumsy.

And it's four o'clock in the morning, with warm air wafting through the windows, and the prospect that _after,_ they will return to the resort and take a walk on the edge of the sea…

… _after._ He's laughing, having undone one of her sandals: fingers brushing her instep, not quite tickling, but nonetheless making her wriggle at the sensation, which provokes from him an involuntary gasp—she's sitting on his lap, after all—

-and then there's a thin wail from outside.

_Constant vigilance,_ she thinks, with the furious aside that no doubt old Moody found it easier, in his solitary life, to follow that maxim.

With a cold stab of fear, she remembers what happened to Moody in spite of his best efforts, and puts aside the pleasant thought of what she and Neville might have done _in the absence of external threat. _They disengage, and she crosses the room in a heartbeat, to glance in the foe-glass—nothing there—though there is a huddled shape on the front step. She looks out through the peep-hole… and sees that unmistakable blond hair.

While post-war reconciliation is all very well, she does regret the days when Draco Malfoy was her enemy, or she was his, because it meant that she had no obligation to meet him socially, particularly not at four o'clock in the morning. _Particularly not_ at four o'clock in the morning, on the front steps of her parents' house, when she's been _otherwise occupied _in very pleasant mutual investigation with her boyfriend.

She opens the door, with wand discreetly drawn, just in case her visitor is thinking to be about anything beyond annoyance, and says, "Malfoy. It's four o'clock in the morning. Why are you skulking about _again?"_

She doesn't really want an answer to that question. Really.

Neville says, quite sensibly, "People don't _skulk_ with babies." The wail, of course, is Hypatia, whose face is screwed up in unaccustomed distress. In the light from the windows, she sees the stricken look on Malfoy's pale face, paler than usual if she doesn't mistake. Something has seriously scared him.

Quite seriously, because when she gestures to him to stand, he can't manage it. He won't let go of Hypatia, which makes it rather awkward as she and Neville help him to his feet. They tell him to come inside so that they can talk it over sensibly. Problems that are scary in the dark frequently take on a more reasonable character by electric light.

ooo

Hermione thinks it might be the better part to decline Boudicca Derwent's offer of apprenticeship as a Healer, because it requires a positive effort to be _decent_ and _caring_ when she's just had her private life interrupted once more. She really is tired of Malfoy turning up on her doorstep at four o'clock in the morning, and at the most inopportune times: first, as she's having breakfast, and then as she's reuniting with her parents, and now, when she thought she might take advantage of the dark and the quiet and the romantic late-summer evening to have a proper snog with her boyfriend…

A voice in the back of her head tells her that sexual energy does all sorts of odd things when it's diverted from its original intent. There must be something to that, because her original plans of ruffling Neville's hair and putting her hands on him under his shirt have transmuted quite effortlessly into the suggestion that snapping Draco Malfoy's skinny neck wouldn't be too difficult, and could be accomplished in time both to return to the originally scheduled programming and to have a nice breakfast on the Mediterranean coast with her parents afterward.

Nonetheless she sighs, and puts on her compassionate face. Now that she's had a look at her guest in good light, he's is plainly in distress: white-faced, shivering, and now that he's sitting on her parents' couch under bright if diffuse electric lighting, with sharp contrast between his pale skin and dark robes, his hands are shaking.

No wonder the baby had started to cry. His terror must be communicating itself to her.

Draco has permitted Neville to take the baby out of his arms; she's still crying, but a little less desperately now, and Neville carefully holds her so that she can keep her brother within view. Hypatia is rather sweet actually, if you forget that she's a baby Malfoy. Her fine blond hair has been pulled into two tiny pigtails and tied with green ribbons—of course, Draco would decorate his baby sister in Slytherin colors—and she's wearing miniature traditional robes, grass-green silk with a stitched silver-and-gold pattern of snakes and eggs. The effect is really quite adorable, if you forget the notions for which that costume stands. (She flashes for a moment on a baby Draco in scaled-down Death Eater robes, and wishes she hadn't.)

Neville cuddles her and jiggles her a bit on his knee, which she seems to like; by and by, her crying settles a bit, and then it's a crooning whine, and then she looks about and delivers herself of a squawk that seems to be neutral in intent… at any rate, not so distressed.

Her brother is sitting on the couch in a parody of well-bred alertness; the angle at which he leans forward is perhaps a trifle too acute, and the knuckles of his folded hands show white. Hermione looks back to see his eyes on her, expectant and something else.

She's a little shocked at the animosity she sees in that face, pale and pointed with the grey eyes in it like demonic lanterns… except just now they're both brighter and darker than she remembers. Brighter, from unshed tears, and darker, because the pupils are dilated… and that look is focused on her, _with interest._ A very specific sort of interest, that makes her want to cover herself in her full-length winter cloak. Neville was looking at her that way just now, before the _untimely interruption, _but that sort of regard from Malfoy makes her shiver in revulsion.

She steels herself to be a decent human being, in spite of that stare. At least it's her eyes that have his attention, because if it were anything lower she'd hex him and be done.

She asks him again what the matter is. He shakes his head, and she can see the layer of tears, like rainwater, shiver a little on the pink ledge around his eyes (yes, there's a bit of adrenalin here—for she's noting the shape of his eyes and how like they are to his mother's, and the way the tears bead on his pale lashes when he blinks).

"Is there someone we can call?" she says. "Your mother…"

At this he goes white, and shakes his head again. "No," he says in a soft voice, and whispers, "I can't sleep." He looks down. "I hadn't meant to interrupt _you…_"

"You wanted to speak to my mother," Hermione says, and he nods. Of course. It's something to do with Hypatia, no doubt. "She's on holiday, with my father."

Neville, holding the baby, blushes, and looks to one side.

"I can't sleep," he repeats. It's plain that whatever the matter is, he's not going to tell her.

She steels herself for the utter ruin of all her plans, and says, "I have some Dreamless Sleep, for emergencies," she says. "And there's a spare room at the villa."

He looks apprehensively at his sister. Neville says, "We'll mind her, don't worry."

Yes, indeed, all ruined. Life is real, and life is earnest, and more of it is baby-minding than it is romance. Neville understands that, and so does she, but nonetheless she can't help a certain twinge of resentment. Her parents are used to Draco turning up at odd hours; they'll take this in stride. She and Neville will get their sunrise walk by the sea, but it will be more in the nature of a conference.

Hermione goes to the bathroom for the flask of Potion, and hears Neville ask him if he can manage Apparition just now, or would like to Side-Along…

… which she remembers that the baby _doesn't like,_ and is reminded afresh when, after squeezing out of the dread compression into the little courtyard in the cool blue dawn, Hypatia hiccups and then spits up all over Hermione's blouse.

Well, that's what a wand is for, she thinks.

ooo

They walk at the edge of the sea, the stars fading and the waves dimly lit in the rising light. The baby fusses, but has decided that she trusts them. In particular, she trusts Neville, sufficiently to fall asleep on his shoulder.

Hermione is still troubled by Draco's crazed manner: the paleness, the tearful glowering full of rage and lust and terror, as if he fancied her and at the same time wished her dead. It makes her feel chilled and unclean at the same time, being looked at like that.

She realizes, halfway through her attempt to explain it to Neville, that she's always been very much more skilled at talking of technical matters than of states of the heart, for all she reproached Ron with his lack of nuance.

Neville is silent, which she has learned is more or less assent. If he disagrees, he says so.

She tries to avoid thinking about how strange things have become. The baby is simply _the baby;_ it doesn't do to think about who her parents are. It's not the baby's fault, of course, that Lucius and Narcissa had a last fling before he went to Azkaban for twenty years. If she thought about the case in the abstract, carefully leaving those sharp-featured faces out of it, she would feel sorry for them.

(As it is, she's talked with Kingsley Shacklebolt about the conditions in Azkaban. Not a cheerful place, even now, but at least it's only a medieval prison, not the domain of the soul-suckers.)

Neville points out that every time they've been on duty in the waiting room, it's been Draco carrying the baby or attending to her. Narcissa seems oddly detached, almost as if she's rejected the child, or is preparing herself to do so.

In the old Pureblood lines, as in ancient Rome, not every child was permitted to live.

The dawn light reflects off the placid waters, and the sails of the fishing boats show pale, then rose, as they put out to sea. It's a very old place, this harbor, and those sails, if she squinted, might be Roman galleys or the swift boats of the Greeks… or at a later date, the dragon-prowed vessels of the Vikings, that still menaced the coasts of England when Hogwarts was being built.

Their fingers interlace, loosely, as they walk, and she says once more how little she liked Draco's predatory grey-eyed glower; it reminds her of unpleasant things and bids her watch her back.

Neville agrees, this time aloud. One tolerates (even forgives) people like Malfoy (because they're fools, because they were too young at the time), but one can't help being reminded of what they did as children, even if politeness forbids speaking of it…

…says the man who still remembers being the boy whom Malfoy had used for target practice.

Neville's big hands hold the baby steady as she sleeps against his shoulder. Hypatia looks remarkably like Draco when she's asleep; Hermione can see the point of the chin, and the angle of the nose—even though it's a soft babyish dab now—how that face will lengthen, and sharpen, and the grey eyes focus… eyes like a wolf, wintry and hollowed-out with hunger.

The little girl with the dangerous face is a fictional character, she has to remind herself, and her brother's ferocity is more cornered rat than ravening wolf. It's not she but her mother who will sort out what it is that has so terrified him.

In a few hours, her parents will wake up, and Draco will as well, and then they'll sit on the terrace facing the sea eating breakfast while Draco talks to her mother, _Madam Granger_ as he inevitably addresses her. And then, maybe, the mystery will be solved, and she can return her attention to more pleasant things.

ooo


	25. Chapter 25

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

The baby has woken and become restive as they return from their walk. The warm little body stretches and wriggles; she fusses, trying out little tentative cries, looks about. Hermione thinks that Hypatia might be wanting her brother, so they tiptoe into the guest room where Draco had lain down to take his dose of Dreamless Sleep.

He has turned onto his side, under the covers, and is hugging the pillow, looking very childish himself with his hair hanging over his brow and his face half hidden in the pillow.

Hypatia stretches her arms toward him, and Hermione carefully places her on the bed… of course, she'll have to keep watch, because Draco is quite thoroughly asleep.

Hypatia settles for a bit, nuzzling close to her sleeping brother like a little cat, well, very like Crookshanks in one of his more affectionate moods. After a bit, she starts to fret and to pull at his hair. He doesn't respond, of course, under the influence of the Dreamless Sleep.

Hermione picks up the baby again and frowns, feeling a bit at a loss. Neville brushes the baby's cheek with his forefinger, and she turns to it with her little rosebud mouth working…

"I think she's hungry," he says.

"He didn't have the baby things with him," she says. "Oh, _bother_." She already knows that there isn't anything in the villa suitable to feed a baby.

The tap on the door interrupts her. Her mother looks in, soignée and composed, though still wearing her dressing-gown. "I was hoping you'd tell us why Draco turned up here."

The baby fusses and waves her arms, apparently deciding that she's had enough… and emits a thin, desperate cry, followed by another in swift succession.

"She's hungry," Hermione's mother says.

"He didn't bring the baby things," Hermione says, distinctly irritated-well, somewhat more irritated than before.

Neville says, mildly, that the baby things wouldn't have included a bottle in any case. Pureblood mothers look after their children in the traditional manner.

Hermione frowns, and her mother says, "So… either a wet-nurse, or the mother herself."

Neville nodded. "Or the house-elves. But I understand the Malfoys haven't any of those left." He adds, rather delicately, that whatever one might say against Narcissa Malfoy, she is a devoted mother by her own lights.

Draco murmurs in his sleep and turns over; his legs tangle in the blankets. He struggles, then startles awake with a scream. Hypatia wails yet louder at her brother's distress.

Hermione had given him a dose that should have kept him asleep for a good four hours at least. Well, she supposes she ought to have suspected he would have been dosing himself with the stuff… and habituated himself.

However much she would like to cover her ears against the screams of the baby, it seems it would be bad form. Nonetheless, she decides that it is going to be a long time before she thinks about children of her own.

Her mother sits down in the chair next to the bed. Draco fumbles in his robes, looking for his wand; his look is feral, glazed and unseeing. No, she does not need him pulling a weapon on her mother. She has her wand out to Stupefy him, but even more swiftly—and remarkably for his size—Neville sits down on the bed, and takes both of Draco's hands, helping him to sit up, while discreetly foiling his reach for the wand. "It's all right," he said. "You're safe. Hypatia's hungry, though."

"I can't take her home," Draco says. "She's not safe." He takes Hypatia in his arms. Rather than settling, she screws up her face and howls yet more loudly, thrashing and plucking at the front of his robes.

Those cries are finding the resonant frequency of every bone in her skull; Hermione thinks she will go mad, for the baby has a quite good set of lungs on her, and … well, she supposes that's how the young of the species manage to get themselves fed.

Her mother says to Draco, "Now, do be sensible. If she needs her mother…"

Draco shakes his head vehemently, with that furious and tearful look on his face again. Hermione glares back at him.

(She really is quite sick of the dramatics…)

He mutters something under his breath, and then glares at Neville and Hermione. Hermione's mother gives her a significant look, as Neville tugs on her arm. She whispers, "I'm not leaving him alone with my mum. He's got a wand…"

Neville says, "I think it's going to be all right."

Hermione's mother says, in her crisp sensible way, "Of course it is." Hermione thinks that might be so, given the way that Draco has relaxed, for all he has a furious, hungry baby in his arms.

Neville puts his arm around her, his warm skin touching hers, and she tries to quell the resentment that flares along with the desire, as they leave the room and close the door behind them.

ooo

Hermione doesn't know how her mother can concentrate; she can hear the baby screaming from the other side of the closed door. Neville holds her close and whispers, "He's in a bad way."

Of course she knows that … except that there are nuances she misses, not being Pureblood, and Neville seems to understand what's going on better than she does.

A few minutes later, the door opens and Hermione's mother leans out. "He wants Andromeda Tonks. His aunt. She lives in Diagon Alley… I don't suppose she has a telephone?"

Hermione shakes her head. "No, but I can fetch her." She closes her eyes, concentrates on the happiest memory… and what was that, this time? The moment when the multi-layered memory charm unwound, and her mother's face took on the look of recognition… the same look of recognition that she had been lavishing, just now, on Draco Malfoy, of all people, who had never done a thing in his whole life to deserve any such thing, and had wished her dead… no, it didn't do to think about that, because that was a twelve-year-old boy of surpassing ignorance who had said that, a little boy who had been more like nine years old than twelve…

She's never had this much trouble producing a Patronus, but nonetheless the glowing transparent otter emerges from the wand-tip, does a backflip and looks at her expectantly as she confides their location and the urgent request for Andromeda's presence…

Her mother looks at her steadily. "Very impressive."

Behind her, Draco favors Hermione with that disturbing stare, equal parts hostility and lust, the effect somewhat blunted by his reddened eyelids.

The thought that he's been crying, and she supposes, leaning on her mother for comfort, infuriates her. Now she understands some of the undercurrents in Ron's family, the jealousy of his mother's attentions to his older brothers and to Ginny. Sibling rivalry, indeed—one more passion she'd missed entirely, being an only child.

There is a soft noise, barely more than the popping of a champagne cork, and Andromeda Tonks is in the room with them, Teddy Lupin sleeping in her arms. She has been roused from sleep, for she's wearing a dressing-gown as well, over men's pyjamas. She confers briefly with Hermione's mother, goes into the guest room, and takes Hypatia in her arms. There's a noise from Draco that sounds like a choked-off sob, and the door closes on them.

ooo

Hermione does not like the feeling of having been exiled from the grownups' councils. Neville tells her that she didn't need to solve all problems, and underlines that with a warm embrace.

She says that no doubt it's dreadfully selfish of her, but she really has had quite enough of all this.

Neville says it is a crisis best handled by their elders, and really, she'd said herself that Draco was a little boy, and if he'd guessed was correct, he was holding up surprisingly well.

ooo

The family council takes rather longer than expected. Neville organizes some breakfast, enough for all of their guests, as Hermione's father walks into the little kitchen and asks if he hadn't heard a baby crying.

Neville nods, and Hermione says that indeed he had; it was Draco's little sister and there was a family crisis of some kind. "Mum and his aunt are sorting it," she says. "We may as well have some breakfast in the meantime."

Hermione's father looks at Neville, and then at her, and says that they have the look of people who'd had a night of it. He _is_ rather a handful, the Malfoy boy.

Hermione nods, and says that has been the case for some while. She holds his parents responsible, of course… though (she adds sharply) lately he seems to have no shortage of surrogate mothers.

Her father raises an eyebrow; no doubt her bad temper shows. She feels cranky from lack of sleep, and frustrated lust, and sheer annoyance.

ooo

When Hermione's mother emerges from the conference in the guest room, she announces that things are rather complicated. In any case, she says, Draco's Aunt Andromeda will be joining them for breakfast, with her grandson, and perhaps the children might make a morning of it on the beach while they conferred after dining.

Somewhat distractedly, she adds that it appears that there is some _concern for the legalities_… oh, and what a lovely breakfast.

Andromeda comes out next, Teddy trotting at her heels and Hypatia in her arms, cooing. Draco follows her, looking shamefaced and downcast, head bowed so that his hair shades his eyes.

They partake of breakfast on the terrace overlooking the sea, since there is not sufficient room indoors for six adults and two small children. Hermione is startled by the resemblance in manner between her mother and Andromeda; the latter's resemblance to the House of Black seemed overshadowed now by her family likeness to brisk, sensible Ellizabeth Granger. They are organizers, both of them, and now they are talking about what could be done under wizarding or Muggle law and whether Kingsley Shacklebolt ought to be brought into it. The terms of Narcissa's probation might not permit her to exercise certain _traditional prerogatives_, but nonetheless the terms of her marriage contract might compel her… well, yes, Andromeda clarifies, that compulsion would be literal, as real as Imperius and as unforgivable, in the vernacular sense.

Draco eats breakfast, looking down at his plate as if the food on it bears him a personal grudge and he is only returning the sentiment. His shoulders hunch defensively, and once or twice Hermione sees him blink back tears.

Andromeda adds that Draco had done quite the right thing; sometimes it's the better part of valor to call in the reserves. Not everything can be handled in splendid isolation, and this would be such a case.

Hermione realizes those words are meant for Draco, for all he seems to be ignoring everyone at the table.

He looks up, and says quite distinctly that his mother has _plans_ for him, and means to marry him to Ted Tonks' Muggle niece, because she is quite sure that the Grangers would refuse a marriage offer.

Hermione thinks that certainly would explain that odd, hateful look he'd been giving her. The conversation makes her feel as if she has been dropped into one of those Regency novels that her mother used to read on the sly.

Elizabeth Granger says calmly that there is a cultural misunderstanding; parents of their class haven't negotiated their children's marriages in the Muggle world for _some generations now_, and in any case there is no Granger fortune at issue.

William adds that it seems wizarding folk are in rather a hurry to marry off their children, which puzzles him because they have more decades to play with than non-magical folk. One should see the world, expand one's horizons, before settling down so decisively.

Hermione expects the usual Malfoy hissing and spitting at her father's remark; to her surprise, Draco sits up straight and only says that it _isn't like that_. He already knows what a Pureblood heir needs to know: his bloodline and his duties, except that … things have changed. _Everything_ has changed.

For the briefest moment, she feels sorry for him, for he sounds like a small child who's quite lost.

William Granger shakes his head. "More things in heaven and earth," he says. For a man who could live to a hundred and twenty, Draco seems rather in a hurry.

Andromeda says that she concurs. In any case, Audrey Tonks isn't old enough, and her parents wouldn't be likely to approve of her marrying her first cousin. The Tonks family isn't royalty, to be constrained to close connections. Not to mention that the young people have never met.

Andromeda says, with finality, that the main thing is to settle Hypatia's affairs. After that, they could talk about the rest. The end of the war has meant a great many changes, for everyone. The old rules needn't hold any more. Those rules already have done enough damage in their time, and she sees little reason for that pain to persist into another generation.

Draco stands up, pale and furious. "Yes, everyone's Half-bloods nowadays. Everyone who counts. And we're all to go extinct, or be married off to Muggles…"

Andromeda gives him a quelling glance. "It's all very upsetting, I know, but your sister's safety is at stake." She adds, "You've borne up admirably, all things considered."

She nods to him, a dip of the chin that unambiguously says, _Sit down and behave, _and says, "No one here wishes you ill."

Hermione thinks that it is a good thing either that Madam Tonks is not a Legilimens, or that she is a reasonably accomplished liar.

Draco sits down, but says, "I don't want my sister to be a Tonks."

Andromeda replies, with surpassing blandness, that the law affords a number of solutions, all of which could be considered after breakfast and a dip in the sea. Speaking of which…

She flicks her wand to reel Teddy back in from his headlong dash to the glittering blue.

ooo

The morning is still young when they finish breakfast. Andromeda excuses herself to get some more suitable clothes, and winks out of sight. Hermione can't help noticing that her Apparition form is _superb_, her departure all but noiseless. The Purebloods can't be faulted for lack of style.

She returns with Teddy's beach things, and a little ruffled bathing-costume for Hypatia.

ooo

It is still early, and they have the beach to themselves, which Hermione reckons a good thing, especially when Draco stops on the gently sloped sand to take off his over-robe, and then his under-robe, and pointedly refuses the offer of swimming trunks, because what is the point of undressing to swim and then dressing again?

She averts her eyes as he shrugs off the last layer, the long white shirt, and folds it neatly, placing his wand on the careful stack of clothes. (Yes, he really is medieval down to the underthings.) She wonders, though, at the way that he keeps glancing over his shoulder at her as he disrobes.

She and Neville splash about in the shallows with Teddy and Hypatia, as Draco swims out further into the deep water, with smooth, sure strokes.

Neville leans over and kisses her, over the heads of the children, and says that she has little of which to be jealous. Teddy sees the embrace, and demands that they kiss him, too.

Hypatia shrieks in delight, and slaps the surface of the water. Teddy kicks at the softly lapping waves, and laughs. Off from shore, Draco floats on his back, face up to the delicate blue sky, looking improbably angelic.

ooo

**Author's note:** Apologies to my readers for the delay in posting; a rather too strenuous work schedule, computer problems, and a back injury have made it rather challenging to do much writing lately.


	26. Chapter 26

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

She says to Neville, quite seriously, that she knows she's not living up even to her own standards, that she feels jealous of Malfoy, who has seemed to have been adopted by her parents. She resents the attention he's getting, especially from her mother, and she knows that's childish, but she can't help the feeling. It's sibling rivalry, the passions of brothers and sisters.

Neville tells her that it's _she_ who's envied, and not only by Malfoy. Nearly everyone in their Hogwarts generation envies her, because she saved her parents. He knows that for his own part, once he learned the facts of the matter…

He'd wager it's a common daydream among the children born in the late seventies and early eighties: to travel back in time and intervene between their parents and the death-blow.

It's an impossible fantasy of course. None of them remember their parents.

Hermione reaches across and strokes his cheek, and he turns to kiss her hand, and then reaches to keep Teddy from paddling out into deeper water. "He envies you, too," Neville adds, glancing out to the patch of sunlit water where Draco is floating, eyes closed. "He didn't manage it, even with them both alive."

Hermione shakes her head. "I don't understand what this business is…"

"His little sister. He thinks she might be a Squib… or he's afraid that she is, and if that's the case, the rumor is that her mother is compelled to put her out of the way." He pries Hypatia's little fingers from the sharp bit of shell that has fascinated her. "The Malfoy marriage contract is an open secret, of course, in _our_ circles. They say the Squibs are buried in the rose garden."

She shudders; that garden had seemed so serene and lovely under the summer sun.

"And his mother seems to have come around to the notion that Half-blood grandchildren wouldn't be a disgrace, but it's not as if it's going to be a love match. They'll do as they've always done: breed for power, and for the stability of the line."

She frowns, looking out to sea. "So Draco won't have much choice in the matter."

"No, I wouldn't think so. You heard what Andromeda said; his mother is thinking of marrying him off to his Muggle cousin that he's never met."

"His Muggle cousin." That sinks in for a minute. "I'm glad Andromeda cut that off. The girl wouldn't have a nice time of it." She shivers, in spite of the warm sea breeze. "I wouldn't care to be married to Malfoy."

"Nobody would, these days," Neville says.

She remembers that Pansy cut Draco dead, right there in the waiting room at the clinic.

Hermione considers that in silence. She remembers—they both remember—the endless litany of "my father says" and "my father will arrange," and now his father is in prison for twenty years and his family is in disgrace, he's had it drawn for him in the starkest lines, just how little his father counts in the new order of things, and just who it was that had to do with him before for his father's sake and not for his own.

That little display, just now, glancing at her to see if she were watching as he undressed, now seems pitiable; he wants to be _noticed_. And that glower full of hate and desire: well, that makes sense. You hate what you can't have…

She shakes her head. "I think my father was right about him being in too big a hurry."

Neville says, "I think so too, but that's not the way that Draco will see it."

She considers that for a bit, as Hypatia splashes about, laughing at the light dancing on the water. What it must be to be nothing more than the conduit of a bloodline? She can't remember a single time he ever spoke of _himself_, really, except as his father's son ("my father says," "my father will do something about that," and then ever so briefly, she imagines, he thought the same of his father's Dark Lord, except he did rather learn better of that).

Even Neville at his most shy and clumsy had had more personal authority than that. He'd spoken in his own person every time that she'd ever heard him, which is why his grandmother's wealth and connections came as something of a shock.

She feels rather ashamed of herself, being peevish about being interrupted… for she and Neville can take up where they left off; Neville's _there_, after all, and he cares for her. Even if her school friends have busier lives now, they still care what happens to her. She might have broken up with Ron, but after some awkwardness he's still her friend. He's doing right by Lavender, too, which pleases her; he's nowhere near as superficial as he pretended to be.

Neville says, "Penny for your thoughts. Or a knut, as the case may be."

She says, "I was annoyed when he interrupted us… you know. I didn't realize it was something this serious. It's not as if he explained himself, really, but I ought to have been better about it."

"He _is_ annoying, and none of us ever really liked him." (An understatement, she thinks.) He frowns at the horizon. "It's hard not to remember the other things." He shades his eyes against the sun. "I think we should go back soon. The sun's getting a bit high."

She nods, and stands to survey the deeper water, where she last saw Draco swimming. He's nowhere to be seen, and she feels a stab of panic.

Something closes on her ankle, under the water, and Teddy and Hypatia scream at the very same moment she does—as Draco breaks the water, laughing and shaking his drenched hair like a wet sheepdog. The children pile on him, laughing. Teddy, true to form, grabs a handful of his hair, and Hypatia splashes.

"That wasn't very funny," she says sternly. "You could have gotten yourself hexed, startling me like that."

He smirks. "That assumes you have your wand, and the presence of mind to use it." He turns his attention to the children, who traitorously decide he's the most interesting of the three adults. Teddy follows his cousin's example of swimming _au naturel,_ and sheds his trunks; Hypatia plucks at her bathing-costume but hasn't the dexterity to make much headway with it.

Hermione feels piqued both at the bad example, and at being annoyed again, just as she was going to be the noble, grown-up person she sees in the mirror of her dreams.

"I'll watch them," he says.

"I'm not sure I ought to trust you with _two_ children, especially if you're going to be this irresponsible," she says sharply.

He glares at her. "I'm not going to drown them, Granger, if that's what you were thinking." He adds, "I thought you and Longbottom might appreciate a bit of a swim yourselves."

Neville says with equanimity that no one is accusing him of anything, particularly not with respect to his cousin and his sister.

Teddy gets to his feet and wades out into water up to his chest; Draco scoops him up and says, "Enough of that for _you_ until you can swim."

She and Neville take their swim, though close in to shore and keeping an eye on Draco as he splashes through the shallows with Hypatia in one arm, chasing Teddy. There are two children, after all, and magic or no, things can happen. On the other hand, it's amusing to see that Draco's reflexes are more than equal to the task of watching a baby and a lively toddler.

Neville smiles and says it's the Quidditch training. He's seen Harry with Teddy and some of the children with whom Andromeda takes him to play.

Hermione says, "And here I thought it was bosh, that notion that Quidditch is training for life."

ooo

After the mid-morning dip in the sea, there is luncheon on the terrace, under shade. There is adult conversation, and further plans. Andromeda Tonks has a formidable grasp of wizarding law, and the ways in which her personal alliances might be deployed to the benefit of her nephew and niece. Elizabeth and William Granger reveal themselves as no less knowledgeable in the matter of asylum on the other side of the border.

Neville leans over, halfway through the meal, to remark to Hermione _sotto voce_ that he has decisive evidence that she comes by it honestly. Draco overhears, and smiles.

Andromeda thanks Hermione for summoning her, and says that it will be a long and interesting fight, but she has every assurance of winning it. She rather suspects that her sister will not put up real resistance; that she told Draco the truth of the matter is a sign of hope.

ooo

The children have gone home with Andromeda, and Draco has gone with them; Neville has gone up to the villa to see them off.

The air is cool and balmy. Hermione sits on the beach, staring out to sea, and thinking how little it feels like a holiday. She's still not entirely happy with what has happened. She supposes she's done the right thing, but she isn't sure by what chain of events she's ended up with horrible little Draco as a brother of sorts. Her mother and Andromeda have definitely formed an alliance, and she's shut out of it.

No, she ought not to resent that; she has no desire to be Draco's guardian or advocate, or anything like it. The grownups are on the case, and she ought to feel grateful.

For him, the clock-hands point to 'mortal peril' every times he looks at his little sister. It was funny, watching him look after Hypatia and Teddy; she's reminded again that he's Harry's cousin, unlikely though that seems. She's the only one who isn't someone's cousin. Perhaps that's the reason that Gran approves of her keeping company with Neville.

Gran. Yes, she has decisions to make, about what happens next, what path she'll take, and she does know that she is wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice in having so many choices. Draco has a Manor to call home, but very little idea of where to go once he leaves its gates.

In this moment, she has this little patch of sand, and the sky, and a temporary lease on the sea and the marvelous colors of sunset. She has nothing to do but to enjoy herself, and to relax. It's odd to be a child again, or to feel like one, after so many years of managing as a grownup.

She doesn't hear the footsteps behind her, feels only the slight disturbance of the air, and then Neville is sitting down next to her and handing her a glass of the local wine, which she takes and drinks. It loosens the knot in her chest, and the odd tense wrinkles in the state of things.

"You hate having to wait," he says, brushing a curl of hair away from her cheek. She shivers.

"I do," she says. Trying to make a joke of it, "What I want, I want now."

"And what is it you want?" If it were anyone else, she'd suspect him of flirting.

"Time for us... alone. And I know I'm a beast for not being helpful to Draco, but …" No, there isn't any "but"; it's bad enough that Draco is terrified for his little sister, and that he can't trust his mother. On principle, she oughtn't to begrudge him someone who can persuade him of other ways of thinking.

Even with the help of his aunt and her mother, he's afraid for his sister's safety every waking moment. She'd had a taste of that, when she knew at the return of Voldemort that she could not leave her parents in the open.

No, she ought not to envy Draco, except that she does.

Next to her, Neville is sipping his wine, slowly, and considering the colors of the sunset sky-or so she imagines, from his silence. At length he says, "I've waited this long, you know. I can wait a bit longer. Don't be annoyed for my sake."

"No, that's not it…" He's quiet, not a tense quiet but restful and companionable, as if they've stopped, on a very long ramble, and they're considering the landscape. She says, "I'm in a hurry, too, I suppose. On my own account. At least Draco has the excuse that it's his parents foisting it on him. I want it all, everything, before I'm twenty-five. That gives me the rest of my life after to relax." It's a joke, of course, but she isn't sure how serious she is… or if she can imagine resting.

ooo

She remembers Neville as he was when she first met him, the round little boy she met on the train, the exciting train to her new life. Everything about him was round: his wide tearful eyes and his chubby cheeks, his square trunk and sturdy legs … though he hadn't been a pretty child in the least, she imagines holding that little boy on her lap and rocking him. He would have been cuddly, she thinks, remembering the plump warm weight of Hypatia on her lap.

Draco, she is quite sure, had been a pretty child. He isn't a pretty adult; what ruins his looks, she decides, is the look of fear, and misery, and angry confusion. (When he was younger, he was ugly because of the perpetual play of malice across his features.) Looking at him produces a feeling in her akin to damp or clamminess.

She shakes that off, because it isn't right to apply an esthetic judgment to someone else's suffering. She probably had looked like that more than once… certainly she knows that she looks ugly when she cries.

Neville puts his arms around her, very gently, and she can feel the hesitation that is asking permission. She settles into the embrace with a satisfied wriggle, and kisses his chin, and considers how it's he who's holding her, and rocking her gently, so if she liked it could be merely cozy. And if she were otherwise inclined…

She kneels up, her knees digging into the sun-warmed sand, to kiss him on the mouth and tell him that coziness is not what she has in mind. He pulls her into his lap, murmuring something into her hair as she wraps her arms around him. When she releases him he says very softly, "I've waited a very long time for this."

She knows that well; over these last months, she's carefully found her way past all his defenses of honor, and roundabout, and reassurance that he doesn't want to be trouble, that he enjoys her company but wouldn't wish to impose… She never would have guessed that he was both the _chevalier pur et sans reproche _and the bashful maiden. But then she goes in for chivalry herself, more or less as a matter of reflex, and even in the matter of peevish, ugly Draco, for why else has she opened the door to him at four o'clock in the morning, and more than once?

She supposes that she and Neville are well matched.

Beyond the warmth of his encircling arms, the breeze stirs on her skin. Around them lies the cooling twilight and the smell of the sea, as the little boats put in to port for the evening.

ooo

**Author's note:** The association of Quidditch with child-minding I owe to J. K. Rowling herself, who remarked in an interview that she'd deliberately designed the game to require the ferocious levels of multi-tasking characteristic of the full-time parent.


	27. Chapter 27

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Summer has given way to autumn, a London autumn of sullen greys and unexpected flashes of sun between brooding clouds. In the waiting room once more, Mary smiles, thinking about the happy developments of the last week, and catches herself at it; the dark boy, Blaise, returns her smile with a cheeky wink, and returns to his magazine.

The second wave of young patients has been odd and unpredictable. Take the case in point: Blaise Zabini, who has decided that they are good friends, and in the last week, has insisted that they must be on a first-name basis. On either side of Blaise, the green-eyed Greengrass sisters, blonde and dark, regard her with the basilisk eye of genteel hauteur. (Daphne and Astoria, she recalls: Daphne is the blonde and Astoria the brown-haired sister, and they look quite ordinary, except that apparently they're _something_ in their own world, and they make sure she knows it, too.)

Blaise, on the other hand, is something of a puzzle. He's dressed quite conventionally, in crisp dark trousers and blazer, and wearing a tie, which looks rather like a school tie, except that it has a tiny repeating pattern of stylized serpents that glow like green stars on its dark glossy silk.

His friend Daphne looked at it and raised one eyebrow, so apparently it's far from conventional in her eyes, in fact might be an irreverent joke of some sort.

Blaise has an addiction to celebrity gossip, particularly to do with the stage and the cinema, and he recently has taken to leaning on the counter and asking her odd questions. He knows about Jackie Bones, and in fact his first words to her were a polite expression of condolences, which struck her as surpassingly odd, because he had not introduced himself first.

Every day that he is there for his appointment, he makes some small-talk about the weather or the scandalous revelations of the tabloids. He asks questions, rather peculiar questions:

Is it true about flying saucers? Why saucers and not sugar-bowls?

Is the Prime Minister so named for reasons Arithmantic, and if so, what is the prime number considered so auspicious that one can stake a kingdom on it? He's always been fond of seven, and eleven has its points as well, but then fifty-three might do the trick as well. He doesn't think it's thirteen; everyone knows that's unlucky.

How does one make a career upon the stage?

On any given day, Blaise's first two queries vary wildly, and usually set her back, until someone else—once it was Granger (whom he plainly doesn't like very much) and on another occasion, Finch-Fletchley or Goldstein (whom he tolerates)—takes him in hand and explains the facts of the matter. The third question is always the same, and now he has asked three times; just as in the fairy tales, this tells her that he's in earnest.

It takes a bit of effort to wrap her brain around the notion of a wizard who wants to be an actor. She asked him if they didn't have such a thing on his side of the border, and he said, well, they did, but it was of a decidedly amateur character. _Not_ the Royal Shakespeare Company by any stretch of the imagination.

She demurred, of course: she's only the widowed companion of an actor; she's not of the theatrical world herself; but he was not deterred in the least. Surely she knew someone…?

She referred the question, of course, to Granger and Longbottom. Granger sighed, and Longbottom, most uncharacteristically, smirked, and said he would pass on the question to the Muggle Liaison Office. Something could be done, no doubt, though the matter would be easier if it were a question of a Squib rather than a full wizard.

She reads between the lines what Addie makes explicit to her: Blaise's people are _quite_ well-connected, and they were careful if ambiguous neutrals in the late war. Blaise's people, which is to say, Blaise's mother, who has—_had—_a reputation of something of a Black Widow herself. Not for her dark and beautiful complexion, but for the parade of husbands whose untimely demises left her successively wealthier: rather like Elizabeth Taylor crossed with Lucrezia Borgia. There was _quite_ a lot of rumor about the late Magdalena Zabini, who died just after the war, of _poison by an unknown hand._

From the son's manner, manic and insouciant, she wonders at his feelings on the matter. There's a giddiness to him, that places him in the Roaring Twenties, a Bright-Young-Thing frivolity that seems to mask a desperation darker than that of his pale friend, Theo, who has the melancholy droopiness of a basset hound without the canine charm. Theo's father is dead, but Mary is not sure if Theo's mourning is for his parent or for his own lost innocence. Addie has told her that the lot of them narrowly missed being shut up in prison for the rest of their lives, and are on thirty-year probation. She does not specify the crimes, and Mary doesn't ask.

Then there are the odd little ceremonies. The bulky, shambling fellow—Goyle, yes, Gregory Goyle, whom she can't help thinking of as _Gargoyle—_came in one fine morning for his appointment, saw Granger on duty at her little table as usual, and made a profound and archaic obeisance to her, like a knight before the throne, and declared to all assembled that he was acknowledging his life debt to Hermione Granger and (_in absentia_) Ronald Weasley and Harry Potter.

Not only in the spirit of post-war reconciliation, he clarified, but for the honor of the thing.

His friend, the Widow's son, nodded in approval from his seat, his baby sister in her makeshift bassinet on the chair next to him.

Pansy, the ex-fiancée, comes to her appointments faithfully, sits on the opposite side of the waiting room from her former intended, and reads paperback books. She seems to have an insatiable appetite for Regency romances, which she consumes at an amazing pace. That is not her only occupation; oddly enough, she's also a fairish chess player, or at least that's what two of the red-headed Weasley brothers say to a third, one afternoon after she played them both in succession and won.

"Who'd have thought it?" said the tall one, Ron.

"She'll give you a fair fight, Ronnie, she will," said the brother with the missing ear. "Take her on—I've got odds on you."

"Narrow odds," says the other, pushing his spectacles onto the bridge of his nose. "Theo Nott won't play her any more. He says that there's no use in being trounced. And she's been reading up."

Apparently the Parkinson girl has overcome her contempt for things _Muggle_ far enough to have applied for a library card, and that's her reading: Regency romances and technical books on chess. By now she has devoured the whole of Georgette Heyer and has been studying the games of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian grandmasters.

It's a different game on this side of the border, she remarks to Daphne Greengrass.

ooo

Indeed it is, Addie tells her over a restaurant dinner. On the other side of the border, the pieces are sentient and they supply the players with an unending stream of advice and commentary.

Mary thinks that would be rather distracting, and much in violation of international tournament rules. It's like something out of _Alice_, she says.

Their whole world is like something out of _Alice,_ Addie says. She has been reading as well, books she borrows in no particular order from Mary's shelves: the works of Lewis Carroll, a complete Sherlock Holmes, and then the collected stories of Franz Kafka, whom she claims must have worked in the Ministry for Magic in Central Europe, for otherwise how would he know so well the workings of the labyrinth?

Addie has been rather more cheerful since Kingsley agreed to help her find her lost sisters. The search was neither long nor difficult; it turns out, apparently, that there is a discreet agency in London that sees to such cases, the non-magical offspring of magical parents.

So it was, a week ago, that Mary and Addie sat down to tea with a circle of such adoptees. They have found each other, as well: a tall, red-haired aerospace engineer named Edward Thompson, after his adopted family, though his birth-family, he lately has learned, are the very same Weasleys who are such a numerous presence in Mary's clinic waiting room; Sophia and Evangeline Ritter, two of Addie's sisters, adopted by a London solicitor and his wife, who are in their late teens now and have just received quite satisfactory results on their A-levels; the third sister, Tabitha, Addie's elder by a decade, bears another surname and is a well-established concert pianist. There's a chemical engineer named Smith, a Squib of the Prince line (an old, old family, Mary explains, whose Half-blood branch included a brilliant intelligence operative in the late war), and a clever and enterprising restauranteur named Patterson (born Fortescue). Talented, vivacious folk, all of them, ordinary but not quite.

Squibs, they call them. A disrespectful name, on the order of _Muggle._ However, Addie explains carefully, a Squib is not a plain Muggle. A Squib is a witch or wizard, less the full magical power, but with something beyond the ordinary human standard. That _je ne sais quoi_ she does not specify, but Mary remembers Jackie, and the glow about her that Mary would have called magical if she hadn't recently learned what that word meant, literally understood.

A Squib, reared among magical folk, has a difficult time of it: crippled, impoverished, frequently embittered. They say that the Witch-finder General of some centuries back was a vengeful Squib, and in fact some of the older families' strictures date from that time: in some such families, Squib children are not permitted to live beyond their third year. In other cases, the practice of infanticide goes back yet further, some say even to Roman times.

A Squib, among the Muggles, has something special: nothing that anyone ever can put a finger on, but a glimmer and a glow, a special energy, an extended youth and a spry, vigorous old age. Jackie, had she not been cut down in her late twenties, might well have crossed the century mark in great good health.

As for their charisma: well, Mary most certainly can attest to that. Jackie drew her eyes and her attention, so that there was no thought of attention to anyone else on that channel.

And the other thing to note, Addie says: in the descendants of a Squib, the banked fires of magic can flare to life once more, sometimes spectacularly. There's much debate as to whether Muggle-born witches and wizards are a spontaneous arrival of magic, or only the scions of a Muggle family tree that includes a fair proportion of Squibs.

ooo

The candlelight gleams on the swinging curtains of Addie's hair, still worn at what Mary assumes is regulation length, but more stylish, somehow. More contemporary, she realizes: the angle of the cut is likely an imitation of what Addie has seen on the London streets. That soft light darkens and brightens her eyes as well, and the glow of her pale skin. There is a moment when her face seems to be shining from the inside out…

… Inconspicuous, is Addie, but nonetheless alluring. _Charm_, no that's not quite the word, nor is _glamour_, … well, those are all technical terms on Addie's side of the border, whose sense has become attenuated in the secular and skeptical world that followed the withdrawal of the witch-folk to their own enclave.

Mary says, "Thank you. It's been a lovely evening. And a lovely day."

Addie suggests, hopefully, that they might extend it, perhaps?

Mary says that the ride back to her apartment is too long; by the time they get back there, … well, and she has to get up in the morning. For work.

Addie rises, and says, "There's another way." She says, "I'm not on duty now. I wanted you to be clear on that."

Mary folds her napkin, and lays it aside; Addie has settled the bill, and it is time to go.

Addie says, "And I am not your patient. I see Dr. Rosencrantz, not you." Her eyes are even darker now, and Mary notes the rise and fall of her chest, as she breathes—more rapidly and then, carefully and consciously slowing. Training doesn't leave one in the off-hours; it's a part of body and soul.

Mary says, "Am I to understand…"

Addie takes her arm as they cross the threshold of the restaurant, and step into a margin of darkness out of range of the CCTV cameras. "If you didn't need to think about the travel time," Addie whispers, "would you consider extending the evening?"

Mary would protest that it's a silly counterfactual except… this is a witch. A rather fanciable witch, actually. Pleasant company, but with an _edge_, always—a kind of dark enchantment, she would say (and then she realizes that both of those words mean something, across the border, something that is far from a compliment). All of the correspondents, as well: she would say that she's charmed, spellbound…

"Very well," she says.

Addie puts an arm around her waist and draws her into what feels like an embrace, or the first figure of a dance, for they turn in place, and then there is a dreadful compression, as if she were being squeezed through an infinitely narrow tube, a scintillating darkness that whips and twists… and when her eyes open, or the darkness lifts, they are standing in the sitting-room of her apartment, with the evening lamplight cozy against the sullen autumn night outside.

Mary says, "Well." She adds, "Do you always travel like that?"

"Some find it unpleasant. And it requires skill and focus."

"It's convenient, but…" She's not sure that she should agree, in words, that it's unpleasant; Addie might take that as a slighting estimate of her skill. In any case, Nature extracts its payment, it would appear; no convenience but there's a compensating discomfort.

Addie says, "There's one more thing I should confess." She says, "I failed, you know, to save Jackie… and I failed my friend." She says, "I failed her, badly. We were… like you and Jackie, except I wouldn't … I thought I had to follow the old forms. A proper marriage. And I didn't believe her… that things were going to the bad, politically." She adds, "But things are different on this side of the border." And then with an air of ruthless _assessment, _in which Mary recognizes one of her own mental gestures, "I don't know if we would have made a go of it, because she … wasn't one of us, really. Her family was Dark on one side… and the other, incomers. What we call Muggle-born." That with a flash of self-consciousness, because Addie knows how Mary feels about that word.

Mary says, "And I'm a plain Muggle, and you're a witch. That's going to work out so much better, is it?"

"It's a different world over here," Addie says. "More things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in _my_ philosophy." Things have changed. She can look at that horrible boy, the Widow's son, and see him in present tense, not only a combatant but a victim of the war, like herself, and an affectionate brother to his baby sister. Family resemblance does not make one a replica of one's father or mother, but their whole world has been predicated on family resemblances, and family ties, and family hatreds, back three and four centuries. It's easier now, because she knows that her own sense of failure and guilt isn't unique in the least… now that she's been told, not in words but in hints unmistakable, that her counterparts on the other side of the border carry similar burdens, as does even Dr Rosencrantz, as does anyone who has to do with life and death—whether as combatant or Healer.

Mary nods, the tears starting in her eyes at the loss that she still does not remember.

Addie says, "I don't want you to remember… not only because it's regulation. Because I don't want you to suffer." She pauses. "Because I care for you. You stepped in, and you saved me."

Mary shakes her head. "No one saves anyone else. We do what we can. Sometimes that suffices." She doesn't need to add, _and sometimes it isn't enough._

Addie says, "More than half of my family is on this side of the border, and I find… I quite like them. It's not the traditional way, at all, but that needn't be the only way."

ooo

**Author's note:** For Blaise Zabini's theatrical aspirations and the characterization here, I borrow from the work of Silver Sailor Ganymede; for Pansy Parkinson's chess prowess, I don't remember if the debt is owed to _The Waters of March,_ by Duinn Fionn aka Geoviki, or to the moving (but regrettably unfinished)_ Language of Potions,_ by the same author. (Both have interesting characterizations, particularly of Pansy and Tonks.) Pansy's emotional and sexual history with Draco is modeled on the interpretation by Silver Sailor Ganymede in her collection of drabbles, _The Flower and the Angel._ The given name of the Weasleys' Squib son is from Arielmoonstar's _The Red-Headed Boy._


	28. Chapter 28

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

When Mary wakes in the middle of the night, it is with the thought: _Nature asserts itself_. The dream was much clearer; she could almost make it out. There was the flash of green light, and the falling figure; there was the shout, and the other one…

… against that London square, with its rain-slicked pavement, its lights, its passing buses: a city scene, oddly detached from the action in the foreground. Unreal, as if it didn't belong to the same world, as if the action were happening somewhere else, but that was the nature of dreams.

Only this dream doesn't feel like a dream but a memory.

She wakes, and the room is still, except for the sleeper next to her, who mutters and twitches in her sleep. An active-duty soldier or whatever it is_ they_ call it. Those people across the border don't have armies, exactly; all along she's been steering by metaphor.

In sleep, in autumn moonlight – the moon high, and it will be higher in winter - the sleeper is only human. Her hand reflexively closes, a gesture that Mary understands by now; it's the grasp on a weapon that isn't there. Do these folk do their magic in their sleep? Or is there an inhibitor on that as on walking about or striking blows in one's sleep?

_Nature asserts itself_, whether because of her proximity to the original maker of the seal on memory, or because such measures must wear through in dream; she doesn't know. She knows what that pantomime of shadows must be: the falling figure is Jackie, the one who whirls about is Addie, the dark figure behind the burst of green light - the murderer. She can't see his face, of course; she can't see any faces. They're suggestions only, the outlines left once all the details have been erased.

She sighs, for this won't do. She sits up, and watches Addie sleep.

"You don't want that memory back," Addie had said. "It will put you on the other side of that door." Dr. Rosencrantz's door. And would that be such a bad thing? Better to know than not to know. And on the other side of the border, they have their distinguished consultants as well; might there be a reciprocity agreement of some sort? For she's most certainly a survivor of their war, even if it's not acknowledged.

No, it _was_ acknowledged, by that boy in the waiting room: Blaise. Blaise Zabini, he of the antic quips and cranks, conversing with her under the disapproving eyes of his friend Daphne. Blaise and Daphne are friends—not lovers, she's quite sure of that—for Daphne's look is all too clear-sighted. Half the time she's disapproving of her friend, as if he's within inches of _going too far._

And the other, the Distinguished Consultant, what was her name? Peculiar name: Boudicca. Boudicca Derwent. A healer named after an ancient warrior queen, whose grave (so it's rumored) underlies King's Cross Station.

Her own hands close impulsively—what is it she seeks to grasp? As if one could _grasp_ anything…

She will talk to them tomorrow, at work, the liaison officers. Granger and Longbottom, barely out of their teens-heartbreakingly young, like all soldiers, and carrying themselves like adults. She remembers their faces: Granger's is serious, strong-boned and intense, under her mop of thick, frizzy hair; Longbottom looks younger than his years, almost schoolboyish with his still-round cheeks, until you see the scars over his cheekbones, where something sharp, but not too sharp, tore furrows in the skin and (on the right side) came perilously close to the eye-socket. She remembers someone whispering that they had both been tortured in the course of the guerrilla war…

What they have in common is kind eyes, much too old for their faces of course, but kind. It's that observation that makes her cry, that she's feeling reassured by a kind look from _children,_ who are demobilized soldiers.

Addie shifts in her sleep, rolls over, an arm flung over her eyes to shield them, as if the moonlight coming in through the Venetian blinds were too much to bear, as if it were—green spell-fire, the bolt that struck Jackie and dropped her in the street, on the wet pavement, in the rain…

Daphne Greengrass has eyes that exact color. Curious that the color of her eyes is captured in her name as well: the color of light coming through living foliage, but in that dream, green of the intensity of lightning.

Mary does not remember Jackie lying on the pavement, staring up at the lights with empty unseeing eyes, though that must have been… neither does she remember the gesture of the astonished bodyguard, nor the face of the murderer. Addie's kinsman, she'd said.

The sheets tangle around Addie's body, like the drapery of the Winged Victory, as if she were in flight in the skies of dream. The moonlight makes white marble of her arms and the curve of her right breast, carves deep shadows in the folds of the sheets, glints on Addie's teeth as her lips open and she murmurs something unintelligible.

She's on the uncanny boundary between worlds. _There's a witch sleeping in her bed._ Over candlelight and wine, a bargain was made… and sealed in an embrace that took her instantaneously from one end of London to the other, as if by magic. No, not _as if._ _By magic. _

What followed, of course, was ordinary ecstasy… but she supposes that some things are the same, no matter what kind of human one is.

ooo

It's the lunch hour, and the waiting room is relatively empty. The liaison officers are on duty as usual. Longbottom has just stood up to tell his colleague that he's going to step out for some take-away from the café down the street, and would she care for something…?

Granger smiles up at him, and nods. He smiles back at her, radiantly, and says, "The usual, then?"

As the door to the hallway closes behind him, Mary sighs; the decision has been made for her. She clears her throat, and then says, "Miss Granger." A pause. "It is Miss, isn't it? You don't have military rank."

"No, we're not an army," she replies. "Not strictly speaking, no." She frowns, reading the expression on Mary's face. "Is there something I can help you with?"

Mary finds herself nodding, and the tears coming unbidden, professional veneer or not. No, she's taking off the mask of the one who knows best, who's there to help with the healing of the others.

"I… I've been told that I… that my friend…" _Pull yourself together, _she thinks. _Just spell it out._ "My friend was Jackie Bones. Niece to Amelia, the head of your Dimly." (She still doesn't know for what those letters stand, but she's reciting this to a native who presumably knows.) "She was killed by someone named Lestrange, so I'm told." Granger flinches, which Mary doesn't miss; that name must be notorious. "And I was Obliviated, by the bodyguard. Addie McConnell. You know Addie."

Granger nods, with an unreadable expression.

Mary says, with professional crispness, "You did well, you know, to intervene when she was mistreating that boy."

Granger nods. "Thank you for backing me up."

"Tell me… do you know… about _memory charms?"_ Quite unexpectedly, Granger bites her lip. "Do they wear thin after a bit? I'm having dreams, you see…" Granger frowns and hesitates a bit before replying.

"I'm not an expert on _Obliviate,_ actually. What I did was something quite different." She adds, "But I've read a bit about it, since the war. It's not a question much studied. Though Healer Derwent would certainly know." She looks Mary in the eye for the first time. "You're looking for a referral, aren't you?"

Mary nods.

Granger runs a hand through her hair, sighs, and says, "Yes. Yes, I suppose there are people on this side of the border as well." She squares her shoulders and says, "I'll talk to Kingsley directly. Do you know of anyone else who's having problems of this sort?"

Mary shakes her head. "I wouldn't know myself if I hadn't been told."

Granger narrows her eyes, as if drawing a bead on someone or something she decidedly doesn't like. "Well, something will have to be done about _that._" She reaches into her pocket and extracts a baton like the one that Addie showed her, closes her eyes for a moment as if in meditation, and then flicks it. The tip glows, and then a misty nimbus appears, out of which solidifies a ghostly otter. The apparition hovers in midair and looks at them both with its round shining eyes.

Granger says, "Kingsley, could we have a talk at nearest opportunity? About _Obliviate_ and some of our Muggle casualties." The ghostly animal swims off into the wall—and disappears.

"So this hasn't been an issue heretofore?"

"Oh no, but it's going to be an issue _now,_ if I have anything to say about it." There's a satisfied half-smile on her face. "All sorts of things are coming into question in the post-war, and it's high time they did."

ooo

"I wouldn't know myself if I hadn't been told," Mary repeats.

It's a mere three days later, and she has a personal audience with the Minister for Magic. The man she knew as Mr. Kingsley, whose actual name is Kingsley Shacklebolt, is sitting across from her in one of the conference rooms in the clinic. Strings have been pulled, or pressure applied. The force responsible is sitting in the room with her, Mary would suspect, along with the Distinguished Consultant.

Kingsley nods, and Granger narrows her eyes, and the Distinguished Consultant taps quill on parchment and asks her about her symptoms.

Mary tells the whole story, the part she remembers and the part she doesn't, the odd foggy feeling she's had for over two years, no, now that she thinks about it, more like three years, and the way that something in her chest says _no_ when she turns her feet to walk to that square where Jackie's flat was, and how she can't even remember where Jackie's Aunt Amelia lived, because things go strange when she tries to think about it.

Something is not right, and she's known that it wasn't right, because as a professional she has watched people go through shock and grief and, yes, post-traumatic stress, and her symptoms do not match. And yet, all this time, some piece of her has known that Jackie isn't there any more, that she will not find her if she does persuade her feet to go to that square and to ring the bell.

She tells how, when Addie commanded that boy to show the emblem on his arm, she did remember that smoky green firework of the skull and snake, leering over the rainy square.

She squares her shoulders and tells how Addie did not want her released from the spell, how she said that she wishes she could forget, and would not wish that memory on anyone.

And then she looks Kingsley in the eyes—and it's a hard face to confront, not because of his power but his personal charm—and asks just how often his people destroy the memories of innocent bystanders, and (what's harder yet to ask) if Addie McConnell is hiding something with that memory charm. If there is any possibility…

… that the woman with whom she spent the night four days ago is _hiding something._

Kingsley frowns, and says that to his knowledge that report was completely in order, but there was no question that McConnell had taken it hard, very hard, because that bodyguard detail had been her first assignment after the completion of her training.

Granger looks at Kingsley, and then slides a glance at Derwent, and raises her chin a bit before she adds, in that faux-naif way that only a brash young outsider can pull off (and she perfectly well knows it, Mary thinks), that she wouldn't doubt the report was well-gone-over, because Jackie Bones was the niece of the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, after all. The _Squib_ niece. Might that make a difference…?

Kingsley favors Granger with a look so bland that Mary has no doubt that he's dangerous.

Granger, on the other hand, is _not in his chain of command,_ as she pointed out to Addie, and she knows it. She says, "The Squib Question has come to the fore of late, with the Malfoy case, and there's been talk of outlawing the sort of marriage contract that requires destroying any Squibs at age three." There's more than a trace of indignation in her tone as she adds, "This on the cusp of the third millennium of the Common Era."

That comment is clearly not for Kingsley, who no doubt knows the particulars, but for her. Mary shudders at the thought that someone would have considered Jackie expendable, bright and vivacious and heartbreakingly talented as she was.

Someone did consider her expendable, because they killed her.

Derwent says, with blandness to match Kingsley's, that _theoretically_ a clean _Obliviate_ done by a professional can be reversed. The difficulty is that the spell isn't always done to _professional standards. _The cases she's handled show marks more of the sledgehammer than the scalpel, to use a Muggle analogy. In practice, it's worked out to salvaging what one can.

She adds that the memories, or fragments, so recovered sometimes cast doubt on the humanitarian motivations of the spellcaster.

Kingsley says that McConnell was one of the best in her class, and he'll vouch for her as one of his own trainees. Not all Pureblood Aurors are ill-intentioned or incompetent, merely by way of being Purebloods.

Granger smiles slightly, the way La Giaconda might if she were holding a switchblade. Mary is emboldened to ask, "So do you have records of all of the times that your people have done this… _Obliviate?_"

Kingsley looks uneasy, briefly, and then he says, "According to regulations, yes." Mary reads between the lines that those regulations might be more often honored in the breach, particularly in wartime, and by people who considered Muggles and Squibs as… incidental. She wonders briefly what the diplomatic implications will be.

Derwent ignores both Kingsley and Granger, and looks Mary in the eye. "Miss Esmond, I think I would feel confident to take on your case." She adds, looking at Granger, "With appropriate cooperation from my colleagues in your world."

It isn't until Mary exhales that she realizes that she's been holding her breath.

ooo


	29. Chapter 29

Disclaimer: I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

The day outside is raw and grey, with rain that constantly threatens to turn to sleet. Once more the waiting room is taken up by the visitors from the other world. Mary has a wait of her own, no, not the interval in the condemned cell but the interval outside the surgery. But that's to come. For the time, she is the one supervising those who wait, and timing their entry into the inner sanctum, singly or in groups.

Meanwhile, they wait. Pansy Parkinson, with her black lace and blacker hair and kohl-lined eyes, sits across a low table from red-haired Ron Weasley. They have swept the magazines off the table and moved them to another, where they lie in a disordered heap, and have substituted a chessboard. Someone has brought an ordinary kitchen timer, by way of tournament clock, and they are playing, in the silence of grandmasters.

Pansy had explained the rules, and Ron disbelieved her, until his friend Sergeant Granger intervened, and said that was indeed how the game was played in the other world (which is to say Mary's world), in silence and with clocks. Ron frowned, as if someone had betrayed him with a bad practical joke, and then his face brightened a bit, "You mean they don't talk."

"No, Ron," Granger said, "they don't talk."

He hummed speculatively to himself, and then replied that this could be interesting, because he'd always found that part of chess a bit disconcerting, and second-guessed himself, in that clamor of advice, more often than he'd like …

The Red-Headed League is watching the preparation of the game, with various degrees of interest. Certainly the ones who have bets on it, including the brother with the distractingly bright prosthetic ear, and then from the other side of the aisle, Blaise Zabini has taken an interest, as have Nott (the basset hound, she thinks of him) and his fiancée. The fiancee has a perfectly ordinary name (Davis, Tracey Davis), and ordinary brown hair and an ordinary face, open and friendly except when it's opaque and politely neutral.

Blaise chaffs Pansy's ex-fiance. "Come on, Draco, have a look." The boy in question looks at him with cold narrowed eyes, and Mary thinks once more that his parents' choice of a name was completely wrong; there's nothing dragon-like about that cold, quiescent face. He gestures to the makeshift bassinet in which his baby sister sleeps, her chubby fist shoved in her mouth.

"Oh, don't be such a wet blanket. You're letting down the side. Do you want us outnumbered by a lot of Gryffs and Claws?" (The pale girl with the abstracted look has wandered over to join the Red-Headed League.) "Anyway, Granger didn't say anything about babies being banned from Muggle chess matches. So long as they're quiet, I suppose, and your sister is particularly quiet. Especially for a Malfoy." Draco sneers at Blaise, and then glances at Pansy with some apprehension before he relaxes his posture. "There's the chap, now come along." Blaise crosses the room, picks up the bassinet and carries it across the room, where a half-circle of spectators is forming behind Pansy, in mirror to the one behind Ron. Draco follows him, or rather, follows his sister.

Blaise turns back to Mary and winks, as if it's all terribly great fun, annoying Draco (annoyed Draco certainly is, with his mouth set in a thin line, and that pale-eyed glower aimed at Blaise like a science-fiction death ray).

Granger shushes them. The game has begun.

ooo

Mary doesn't know whether it was Pansy or Ron who won that first game of what was looking to be a series, as she has to leave before it concludes. Her relief takes her place behind the counter, minutes before Kingsley Shacklebolt himself arrives to take her on her way. Curiously small world it must be, when the counterpart to the Prime Minister can take half an hour out of his afternoon to escort a patient to the surgery… or whatever they call it in their world.

By the time that Minister Shacklebolt arrives, the chess game has altered the atmosphere in the waiting room. Once or twice there have been protests from Ron Weasley about one point or another of the game, or the use of the clock, to which Granger has replied with rulings; while no chess player herself, apparently she does know the rules. Each time, Pansy has nodded in satisfaction, and looked at Granger with an expression of cautious assessment, that sits oddly in her naturally satirical face.

Outside the doors of the clinic, Kingsley offers her his arm like an old-fashioned gentleman, and says, "It's much quicker than a taxicab."

She takes the proffered arm, bracing herself for what she knows is to come—that sense of compression, being squeezed into an infinitely narrow tube (like a local wormhole, she thinks, remembering the science-fiction stories she read as a girl).

It's in front of telephone call-box that they materialize, and Kinsley sees her in… perhaps the last one of the old kind left in London, she would suppose. It turns out to be a lift that descends to the underworld, hundreds of feet below the London streets. They emerge in a vast hall or cavern, with great fireplaces, flaring with unnatural green flame, out of which or into which robed figures occasionally step. Robed, most of them, or else some very old-fashioned suits, always with an odd note; there's at least one fellow in a bowler, except that it's a saturated magenta-pink, and there's another wearing a fez of the sort htat Percy Weasley sports…

They step into a more conventional lift, in which they are joined by a small flotilla of multicolored paper airplanes, of the sort that Addie sent her, which hover courteously about the Minister's head and shoulders. "My inter-office mail," he explains, and as they get off the lift, accompanied now by a pair of red-robed guardians, Kingsley's ceremonial escort, she would guess, who hold their batons very much in evidence. No, wands. Though she still can't say that, even mentally, without feeling a bit silly: magic wands.

They enter an office, or something she recognizes as an office, with mullioned windows open to a diffuse undifferentiated grey light, and a tall fireplace of its own. "Direct to St. Mungo's," Kingsley says, and he takes Mary's arm once more. He throws a handful of sparkling powder into the flames, steps in with her into the fireplace — and to her surprise the flamers turn green, and if anything they are cold as they flare and flutter around her - as he announces, "St. Mungo's Spell Damage, Healer Derwent's office," and they see a whirl of darkness, flaming hearths going by in the blackness like frames in a film, until they're stepping through once more, into a warm well-lighted space.

The motherly-looking Derwent greets them. (Whence that judgment? Round face, rosy cheeks, brown hair silvering into white like a winter field: but the bearing is that of a world-class surgeon.)

It's very simple, apparently: Mary is to lie down on a couch, what looks like an Empire chaise, as Derwent and one of her colleagues, in eye-searing green robes (not for the witches and wizards the restful whites of an ordinary hospital) raise their wands and summon… a velvety darkness. Not for them, either, the glaring lights of the operating theater.

And that's her last conscious thought.

ooo

She's in dream once more, and is even lucid enough to recognize that it's dream. She's on the street, entering the square where Jackie Bones lived, only a few doors down from her Aunt Amelia. An expensive neighborhood. "Not far from the Ministry, either," a voice says in her mind, directly behind her right shoulder, as if she were in a film but could hear the voice-over.

She doesn't know if the voice is answering her thoughts. It would appear to be so, although she didn't speak aloud.

The street noises come up, lights and the hiss of tires on pavement. Lights, though not so many in the windows. Most would be asleep at this hour.

There's a blank at her side, a moving place where something is missing, and another in her peripheral vision.

"This is the place, I think." The voice is unfamiliar.

"Yes." The assurance alone tells her that can be none other than Senior Healer Derwent.

Time slows.

A silhouette, another human-shaped nothing there, takes shape out of nothing, outlined in the reflected lights on the street, streetlamps and neon and passing cars, though not so many at this hour.

And then a voice she hasn't heard in months, no years: "It's four o'clock in the morning." A rich laugh, and a bit of a giggle at the end: Jackie, only somewhat tipsy.

Then — very slowly now, because surely it doesn't happen like this in nature -, that lightning, forking green lightning, forms a will-o-the-wisp ball and then crawls toward them, brightening as it approaches her companion (dark blank at her side) and wraps her round. What would read, at normal speed, as a blinding flash, has its own complex and not uninteresting structure…

Mary knows that something has been applied to her feelings about the scene, as her companion falls, and someone else lunges from the side, toward the man-shaped source of the slow green light.

Just as swiftly, it's gone, that silhouette in front of her, and others ring them round, silhouettes as well, with a dim reddish glow to them. Red-robed, like the ones with Kingsley just now. Flame-red, cardinal-red, though it's a sort of residual smudge on the darkness, a glow on the film…

One of them points to the sky, and she turns, and suddenly the picture is sharp and clear and real: the raw rainy air on her face, and the dim architecture of the square, and the writhing green firework above the block where Aunt Amelia's flat is… was… the skull leers, the snake writhes out of the yawning jaw and opens its mouth to show glowing fangs. A head that far decomposed wouldn't have any connective tissue to hinge the jaw, she thinks. They are terrorists, but no anatomists. Another thought muses how persistent is one's training, and how odd nonetheless the thoughts that will arise.

The affect is quite flattened now: adrenalin, she would imagine, but there may be something additional they apply in this operating theater of the mind.

This is the part that Addie restored, she thinks, remembering the flick of the wand just out of her peripheral vision, as that boy's thin pale forearm lay on the counter, with its two-dimensional emblem shifting as the flexors of the forearm tensed. The three-dimensional version floating over Amelia's flat is much more terrifying: it has a smoky translucency and motion: surfaces shift in front of other surfaces; the empty sockets of the skull seem to be made of a deeper darkness, like windows onto Void, and the teeth in the dead jaw have a shifting ambiguity as if they might be canine or vulpine rather than human. Altogether, things that are neither one nor the other have more horror than those of definite character.

"The nameless horrors in the back of the fridge," Jackie used to joke. She'd go on: as opposed to the ones that step forward with cheery red and yellow adhesive tags on their lapels, to say, "Hello, my name is Pestilence."

The Four Horsemen step forward at a hotel convention. Hello, my name is War. My name is Famine. Jackie had a whole patter routine about that; they'd done it in one of her New York workshops, and she'd been thinking of trying her hand at comedy on her return to London.

_I am become Death, and the Destroyer of Worlds._ The ghostly firework hovers over the flat in the fashion of a mushroom-cloud, for that's the first thing, really, that popped into her head when she saw that green glow, that high in the sky.

The red-robed figures close about her in slow motion, and one of them gathers up her fallen companion, and disappears soundlessly. It's like a film with missing frames: now you see it; now you don't. Disappeared into thin air, but it's all done with editing. Take out the frames where the actor walked away…

There's no sound, that's the other uncanny thing. From the way they're moving, they must have been talking, to each other and likely to her. It's as eerie as a film with no sound, more so, because she can feel and smell the air on her skin, petrol fumes and city rain, and see the shifting light that's too well-rendered to be anything but reality, or physical phenomena, filtered through her retina and visual cortex.

There's another voice in the voice-over. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." Addie.

"No, it's quite in order." Derwent, crisp and cool, the sort of voice that would still even a fever-dream.

"Quite in order." Kingsley now. "Though it always helps to have a donated memory from the Obliviator."

There's a shift, back into blackness, and then the scene replays itself from ninety degrees away.

Eerily, she sees herself, her own pale ordinary face, and Jackie walking hand-in-hand, laughing; she hears the street noises, and their conversation as well.

"Do be discreet." It's her own voice, heard as she's heard it on tape, with less of the resonance of her own personal echo-vaults in the sinuses, thin and a bit higher than she imagines it to be when speaking.

"Oh, do be discreet, yourself. It's four o'clock in the morning," Jackie is laughing; they've been to an opening-night party and come back late, far too late. Jackie got more unbuttoned when she drank, and Mary became more anxious.

That must have been the very last time she had alcohol of any description, Mary knows, before this summer's excursion to Shakespeare's Globe.

What had worried her? Random hateful strangers, skinheads, who knows. Living in the city, you read, and know, of all sorts of horrors.

Jackie tipped a wink, not at Mary but at the bodyguard, yes, she's seeing this now through Addie's eyes, and then there's he, taking shape out of nothing, and it's Addie who sees him first, and in peripheral vision, Mary sees the wand out, but too late as the forked green lightning flashes around Jackie and she drops, as if she's been released from volition and now, only a thing of bones and meat, left to the pure influence of gravity. Not a twitch of any involuntary muscle, she notices with her trained eye, but all systems extinguished as if someone had turned off the power.

"Excellent form, McConnell," Kingsley says. "Except there's no defense against the Killing Curse, and you know that."

Addie again, sounding more like a sulky student reciting a lesson, "Defense Against the Dark Arts, year four. I know. But I could have taken out Lestrange before he killed her."

There's a hitch into darkness, and the attack replays: the assassin takes shape soundlessly out of the city night, raises his wand, and envelops Jackie in that killing green light. Kingsley says, "Lestrange had extraordinary form at Apparition. Not a sound. And he already knew what he was about, and you didn't."

"Even so," McConnell says.

"Even so, you proceeded per regulations." There's a silvery nimbus taking shape around the wand-tip in her peripheral vision, and coalescing into a falcon, whose powerful wings unfurl as it turns in midair and then vanishing. "You summoned reinforcements—exactly right. Excellent Patronus, by the way."

Mary hasn't had a glass of wine since that night, no, since her dinner date with Addie, and now, she feels the last fumes of alcohol and the faintly anxious fogginess, and the picture shifts ninety degrees, once more—odd to cross-cut memories like scenes in a film—and now it's clear. There's Jackie's face, laughing under the streetlamps, laughing at danger because after all, she's under guard by a highly trained operative who's a witch, and then the threat materializes: the assassin who's a wizard.

Now Mary can see his face, lit in the green flash of spell-fire: pale wolfish eyes, sharp cheekbones, long red-brown hair, well-trimmed and rakish mustache and beard, a figure from a swashbuckling film, robes blowing about him in their own wind, long fingers wrapping around the wand, white teeth flashing as he shouts.

No, he didn't just say, "Abracadabra." Though it's hard to say what he did say, because it was rapid, all run together…

"Avada Kedavra." Derwent, and there's something odd in the way she says the nonsense syllables, as if she were treating them as a pronunciation exercise, with no meaning or personality or intent, as if she'd withdrawn and turned her voice into a robot voice on the radio…

Jackie falls once more, and Mary sees the light leave her eyes: there's nothing and no one there, as she falls to the pavement. She died instantly, there's no doubt of that, and in all of her years in training, in hospital or in clinic, she's never seen a death so swift. The love of her life went from laughing to nothing, gone without a trace, in the matter of a split-second. She can feel her emotions protesting, behind the screen of no-feeling.

"Yes, we've put an inhibitor on that," Derwent says. "Nature does that for you, and we're just helping it along a bit."

ooo

And then she is sitting up, and the inhibitor is lifted, and there's a moment of shock as she hears a voice lifted in heartbroken keening, an atavistic howl of loss, and then realizes to her shame that it's herself, all of that long-suppressed feeling crashing down like Niagara. The tears are unstoppable, too, and her chest hurts as the animal part of her tries to remember how to breathe, so that this three-years-forestalled grief does not destroy the muscle and bone that must channel it.

There is a strong, capable arm around her as she sits up, and a warm voice saying, "It's all right, love. It's normal. It's all right." Addie's voice, though Addie has never called her love, and anyway that's wrong, because her love is Jackie Bones, and Jackie Bones is dead.

ooo

Author's note: "Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." What Mary is (mostly accurately) recalling is J. Robert Oppenheimer's remark, on witnessing the first atomic bomb test, which in turn is his translation of a verse from the _Bhagavad Gita_.


	30. Chapter 30

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Pansy leans forward, watching the chessboard across from Ron Weasley, whose pose mirrors hers. Against expectations, Draco finds that the chess match keeps his interest, less for its resurrection of old House rivalries than for its exotic details and silent tension. It's hard-fought and a close run thing indeed; toward the end, Pansy and Ron both have strained, feral smiles. Hypatia wakes and fusses several times during the match. She isn't hungry, only wanting Draco's attention, so he walks with her, keeping half an eye on the contest.

At very great length, Pansy makes her last move, and announces, "Checkmate."

Ron Weasley lets out a whistle and pauses, looking at the disposition of the pieces. He has a stunned, abstracted look—how one might look if one had discovered something unexpected and not unpleasant in a familiar place.

They look at each other for a long moment, and then Pansy says, "Good game, Weasley."

He nods and says, slowly, "It's different …" He frowns for a moment, searching for the words. "It's simpler, in one way—and a lot more complicated."

Pansy smiles, and it is not a smile she's ever shown Draco. There's no sex in it, but a very different sort of _interest_. "Play again some time, Weasley?"

"Oh yes," Ron Weasley says, still staring at the board. Granger makes eye contact with him, and he startles a bit, and then offers his hand. Pansy's smile broadens as she accepts the handshake.

After Weasley goes into his appointment, pale clever Theo says that he would like to have another bout (in spite of his reported resolution to the contrary). There was something _intriguing_ about this stripped-down version of the game, he says.

As they place the pieces, Theo remarks that it was altogether a shame that they couldn't have had a better chess scene at Hogwarts. Blaise, flamboyant and annoying as always, saunters over and leans against Theo's shoulder. Today he's arrayed in full Muggle regalia, dark blazer and trousers and white shirt with a stiff collar adorned with neckwear that he described as the Slytherin Old School Tie, which sports tiny green-and-silver serpents that (if one looked close) actually _wriggle_ on their black-silk ground.

Oh yes, and green iridescent eye shadow—just enough to be noticeable, and to annoy. Theo shrugs rather violently. "Blaise, there is a time and a place…"

"Well, if you don't appreciate me, then I shall throw my support to someone who does." He changes chairs to sit beside Pansy and rest his head on her shoulder.

"Zabini, don't think the Statute of Secrecy is going to keep me from hexing you…" she says.

The assorted Gryffindors and Ravenclaws don't so much disperse as re-arrange, some keeping their places behind Theo, who has taken Ron's chair, and some taking new positions behind Pansy. She favors them with a glance, but (to Draco's surprise) neither a sneer nor a glare. Certainly nothing like the look she still gives him whenever he crosses her field of vision.

Blaise, rebuffed by both combatants, wanders over to peer into Hypatia's bassinet. "She looks like you."

"She's my sister," Draco says, hoping that he won't have to underline _my sister, not my half-sister_, because that is matter for dueling.

Blaise shrugs. "I always wondered what it would be like. Mother never presented any of my stepfathers with an heir."

The fighting words that come to mind (and die there): _They didn't live long enough_. There are rumors, of course, as to whose _unknown hand_ must have dispensed the fatal draught that put an end to Madam Zabini's checkered career. Certainly there is talk of just how mad she was, or must have been, just as there is talk about the paternity of little Hypatia.

In any case, however annoying Blaise might be, there are two uniformed and at least one undercover Auror in the room to be sure that no sparks catch. Best, all in all, to keep silence, given that he's still _under suspicion_ and Blaise is actually on probation. Hypatia is looking back at Blaise with her bright grey eyes, unafraid in spite of the fact that he is most conspicuously a stranger.

The door opens, and Parvati Patil enters, dressed like a thorough Muggle, Draco notes: jeans and T-shirt and winter jacket. She checks in at the desk, and then catches sight of the chess game and exchanges a brief smile with Pansy. The old childhood alliances are re-asserting themselves in the post-war; the children who had played hide-and-seek in the maze in the formal gardens at the Manor might have fought on opposite sides in the battle, but now…

Now, they have been arriving early for their appointments, sometimes hours early, in this clinic waiting-room which is such conspicuously neutral ground that people can meet here who still cannot greet each other openly in Diagon Alley. Draco never would have imagined Ron Weasley and Pansy Parkinson doing other than trading insults over each other's facial features and war records, but here they've been, _playing chess_.

He picks up Hypatia, and Blaise leans in to touch her tiny fist, the one she's trying to stuff in her mouth as she tries out her tentative smile.

Draco instinctively flinches.

Blaise says, "I'm not going to _eat_ her." He says, "I hardly _ever_ eat babies."

Draco frowns; once more Blaise is having him on.

ooo

Granger is wearing her hair loose today, though her clothes are neat and sharp, a dark-red jumper and black trousers, that make her look as if she's in uniform. He finds himself staring at the hair, whose curly fringe casts a deep shadow over her eyes, and trails over the knitted fabric that covers her shoulders. He tries not to think about that, because he's seen those shoulders bare… the blouse slipping down her shoulder to leave it bare, and her arms golden from the sun. No, when he's out in the sun, he doesn't turn that color.

Blaise pokes him in the arm. "You're staring, Draco." Annoyed, he shakes off the offending hand. "She's off limits, anyway." Blaise has the art of provoking, doesn't he? Always has, in fact. He doesn't want to remember Blaise's flirtation with Pansy, but that was another score… from back before the beginning of the present world, _before the war_.

Longbottom walks in carrying boxes of take-away, and Draco finds himself glaring at him. Yes, he remembers when Longbottom was a fat little duffer who couldn't defend himself against a leg-locker curse, and now… well, now is a different matter. Granger looks up from her ledger and smiles.

"Give it up," Blaise says with altogether grating good cheer. "You're a poor candidate for Romeo. Anyway, you used to call her a bushy-haired—" Draco stomps on his foot, unrepentantly. Blaise glares at him. "What was _that_ for? I'm just talking history."

Draco folds his arms and turns his glare to Blaise.

"Some people are awfully tetchy when they're not getting any," Blaise says, rather too loudly. Granger actually turns around and stares at them. It's more than plain she's heard everything that was said; the room's not large, and Blaise is far from discreet.

"Anyway, isn't your mother going to fix you up with some cousin?" Blaise says. "I hear she's fanciable. Though she hasn't much in the way of taste, because I _also _heard that she was flirting with Percy Weasley."

"You will please _shut it_." Draco is trying to keep his voice down, and failing.

"I didn't say anything against your cousin," Blaise says. "They say she's good-looking, for a Muggle." He smirks, and adds, "Though we're all going Muggle these days. Not so bad. The toys are fun." He takes a silvery wheel-shaped thing out of his satchel, about a hand-span in diameter. It has two black cords dangling from it, each ending in a button. "It's got music in it."

Draco frowns; he'd push Blaise away, but that would get the attention of the Aurors, and he's already had more of that than he'd like. "You're daft, Zabini. I don't hear any music."

"No, like this." And Blaise (who can always be counted on to get in one's personal space) has put one of the little buttons in Draco's ear, which would have gotten him cuffed like the schoolboy he still is, except that Draco startles at the sound filling his head. Someone is playing the piano, and the harp, and, yes, cymbals! Only on one side, though, which is a _very_ odd sensation. He yanks the button out and hands it back to Blaise. "I'm not interested in your toys," he says.

"I _like_ toys. They distract. If you had the right toys, you wouldn't be making trouble for yourself." Blaise sits back in his chair with a smirk, cradling his little wheel full of music. "You aren't going to get your way on this. And you always want what you can't have. You should have paid proper attention to Pansy when she was interested in you."

Draco rears back and glares at Blaise, thinking about how very much he'd like to hex him. Of course, he can't, because then the damned Aurors would be all over him… not to mention the _Daily Prophet_ and (once she found out he'd made trouble for them) his mother, and of the three… well, he'd take his chances with the Aurors and the_ Prophet_.

"Though I will say Granger's a fair bit better looking than she was. Maybe it's the flush of victory."

Draco says, "You were the one saying one shouldn't be interested in blood traitors no matter what they look like. Or, no doubt, the _other sort._" He hasn't said the M-word in months, he realizes. Not even thought it, really.

"Ah, but that was another day and time, and that was Ginny Weasley, wasn't it?" Blaise smirks. "Gingers never were my cup of tea. Now, blonds…" He ruffles Draco's hair, and ignores his glower.

"I am _not_ interested in you," Draco says huffily, "and neither is anyone else here. _Including_ Pansy."

Blaise smirks. "What would you know about it?"

ooo

When Draco emerges from his appointment with Dr, Burgess, Granger is gathering up the array of things on her little table. The person at the reception desk looks at him with indifference; it's not the usual person… what was her name, he'd heard someone say it. Mary Esmond. And who'd said it? The Auror, the one who hated him.

He looks at Granger, as she puts her little desk in order and discreetly tucks her files into that dainty little reticule… which he now understands is charmed, very seriously charmed; the tale is that she'd carried the entire expedition in there when she and Potter and Weasley set out to defeat the Dark Lord: not only some significant part of the Dark Arts holdings of the Hogwarts library, but a tent and clothes and various supplies…

He's staring at her, with a resurgence of his old resentment. "A girl of no wizarding family whatsoever," which contemptuous voice in his head is anonymous for a merciful moment until he realizes it's his father, whom he'll know only through letters until he's released from Azkaban in twenty years.

Twenty years. Draco will be almost forty years old when next he sees his father face to face.

_Granger is responsible_, he thinks, and then pushes the thought away. She and her like are responsible for the world changing, but he's not sure he would have liked to have lived in the other one … or that he would have lived long, in the Dark Lord's disfavor. At any rate, nothing is as it was. The perverse spark of attraction flares into flame every time he sees her, whether or not she's with Longbottom, though usually she is, and it's worse then, because he remembers who they both are… but more importantly, he remembers that she belongs to someone else. It's the duffer who has the right to touch her, not him.

Neville Longbottom is a Pureblood, but nonetheless _not really one of them._ For all he knows the old courtesies, he knows Muggle ways too well to be entirely _comme il faut_... Draco knows he's looking for an excuse for the resentment he feels. And what _is_ it about Granger, of late? Before, she was merely alien, and deeply annoying, one who trod where she ought not. But now, she's exotic, which is to say alien but alluring.

It was the clothes, and her manner … so completely at ease, that night, and of course he wasn't to have seen her; she and Longbottom thought themselves alone. That picture continues to haunt him: what he can't have, what he'd never even thought to want.

It isn't just the Muggle influence, because now he's been introduced to a Muggle girl, at his mother's insistence: Audrey Tonks, his cousin by marriage, if you ignore the strictures of the Black Family Tapestry. Audrey Tonks resembles nothing so much as a much younger version of Madam Rosmerta, which makes sense given she's to inherit her father's pub. She's sturdy and plump, with rosy coloring and sleepy eyes and a thoroughly Mugglish sense of fun: she's rowdy and hearty and _loud_, with a fondness for ale and darts, which game she taught him in the spirit of hospitality. And yes, he did see the light in her eye when someone mentioned Percy Weasley. She didn't need to spell it out, either, that she finds Percy's prim swottiness irresistible.

Why, he won't venture to guess. He supposes Muggles have perverse tastes.

What compels about Granger, of course, is the combination of earth and fire—the Muggle antecedents and the spark of magic. Quite against his will, he finds himself staring at the lines of her body, and remembering Longbottom's big square hand caressing her foot and ankle as she sat on his lap. Longbottom the duffer. Longbottom the blood-traitor, who's done the unforgivable and forgiven him. Longbottom the hero of the Battle of Hogwarts, which makes him a fair match for Granger who is likewise, and more: Granger the logistical genius behind Potter the unnaturally lucky.

"There's rutting with Mudbloods, and then there's sealing it with marriage." His father, talking about James Potter. Not a remark he'd been meant to overhear, but it stayed in his mind for a long time after, always with a shiver that felt indecent. Doing _it_ with one of _them_ …

… and then at the trial it had come out that the Dark Lord himself was the result of a witch's illicit connection with one of _them_, no, even worse than a Muggle-born, a plain Muggle. The lowest sort of Half-blood …

So why shouldn't he want Granger, then? It's post-war reconciliation, isn't it? Except that she's out of reach, which stings, and Blaise Zabini knows it too, damn him, and the only thing that saves _that_ is his sure knowledge that Pansy isn't having to do with Zabini, either. Pansy wants children and Zabini is a Pureblood, scion of a line that's pure back to Carthage and Phoenicia. The witticism is legendary, that Magdalena made to Bella Black in the Slytherin common room when they were both students, about what the Zabinis' ancestors had been about in the Temple of Moloch when the Blacks were yet casting runes in northern darkness or painting themselves blue.

_Toujours pur_ is taken to even greater lengths by the _really_ old families. Blaise is related by blood to the wizarding aristocracy of much of the Mediterranean basin as well as old Nubia and Abyssinia.

Which makes his truck with Muggle nonsense all the more a travesty.

Draco only realizes that he's been glowering when he sees Granger's furious expression.

She has turned in her chair to face him, leaving Longbottom to gather up their winter coats. She's looking right at him.

"I think this has gone _quite_ far enough," she says. "We need to have a talk." His heart skips a beat, and he feels his face grow hot.

Longbottom turns to her and as she stands, he helps her on with her coat. Draco doesn't miss the way those big hands brush her shoulders, decorously enough but unmistakably. Longbottom's brief glance at him, and his more lingering look at Granger, tell him that they've _talked_ about this, talked about _him_ … gods, it's bad enough that she and her mother and his aunt are closeted two and three times a week, conspiring about _his case_, "the Malfoy case" as the _Quibbler_ is calling it.

ooo

Granger nods to Longbottom, her cloud of hair bobbing. Longbottom says, "I'll see you later—at home?" To Draco's relief, there are no more gestures of possession.

Then they are off, he carrying Hypatia, and she, walking rather faster than he would expect. He finds that he was having trouble keeping up with her. Eventually she notices, and slows her pace.

They walk down the corridor, out the double doors of the clinic, and thence to the street.

She stops briefly to repeat, "We're going to have a talk, because this can't persist." They walk up the street to the pub-café place, the one where he'd had that very uncomfortable conversation with Pansy. Of course, she doesn't know that, nor does she seem to be aware that the Slytherin contingent has taken it over, of late.

Well, she does realize, once she steps inside to see Theo Nott and Tracey Davis sitting in a booth drinking glasses of wine and chatting over the starters to their supper, and Pansy with Daphne and Astoria and Blaise, and …

She frowns. "Well, this won't do," she says, as more than one head turns in their direction. She ignores the stares of the room full of Slytherins, and turns on her heel.

ooo

After a bus ride and a tricky bit of Apparition, it's at another location entirely, an anonymous café in Charing Cross Road, that they sit down and order coffee drinks—well, she orders for both of them. She looks around with a shudder, though he sees no reason for her apprehension. She says only that she had a spot of bad luck here during the war, but that's nothing to stop her making use of it.

She means to have a proper talk with him out of earshot of anybody who was likely to bear the tale elsewhere. His recent _nonsense_ has a serious bearing on his case, which is to say, Hypatia's case. That makes him sit up and take notice.

She says that she had thought that they'd come to a reasonable accommodation, given all the things that had passed… until the night he showed up on her doorstep and interrupted her and Neville. "And you've been glaring at me ever since, and I _don't_ like it."

He stares at the tabletop, with its abstract pearlescent swirls, and then glances up to meet her eyes. "You do know what I mean, don't you? That look, as if you'd like to kill me or eat me up, but you're not sure which." She bites her lip and then says, "As if you hate me, and you fancy me, at the same time. You know the look I mean, Malfoy, and I don't like it."

He's already in trouble, if they are back to surnames.

He says, slowly, "I don't know what you mean."

"Don't play games with me," she said. "I've put in extra hours on your case, but it's not because I fancy you. It's a point of law I'd like to see changed."

"So I'm like your house elves. It's nothing personal."

"Doing the right thing _is_ personal. I can make a difference on this case, but not if you're going to play games." She looks positively fierce, and he shivers a little, remembering how she'd slapped him, third year. Apparently she is thinking of the same thing, because she says, "You always had a way of getting under Harry's skin, and Ron's, but the only time you ever really got at me was telling me that I was wasting my efforts."

He said, "Well, you are. I have no prospects here." Pansy tolerates him in the waiting room, but only by keeping the largest possible distance, and he's a figure of fun to Blaise, and the others ignore him ...

She takes a sip of her coffee drink, and looks at a spot somewhere in the middle distance over his left shoulder. If he doesn't mistake, she's mentally counting to ten. Finally she says, "It seems you're taking that resentment out on me, and I have nothing to do with it. And I haven't missed the way you've been looking at Neville, as if he has something you want."

Draco squares his shoulders and says, "He does."

"Well, I'm not a _thing_ to covet." She takes a breath and lets it out in a long sigh. "I don't know how to talk sense to you." She says, "This is more explanation than you deserve, given the way you're behaving… well, in general it's none of your business. But I'm with Neville because we understand each other. We get on, and I can imagine looking at him across the breakfast table for the next fifty years and more. I'm not interested in romantic drama. I have _work_ to do. I like getting things done, and if I'm going to have a fight, I want to have it with something that _needs_ to be fought. Not the person I'm living with. There was a time I thought that was exciting …"

She pauses, as if aware she's told too much. From across the Great Hall, the sparks between her and Ron Weasley had been more than evident. Even now, there's fire and energy in their friendly arguments… which seem to be a great deal friendlier since they've stopped being a couple.

He says, "Haven't you felt the slightest… curiosity?" She frowns and shakes her head.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Not even the lure of the exotic?"

She said, "If you mean the whole Pureblood thing, let me remind you that Ron is a Pureblood. So was Viktor, and so is Neville. Not that I credit blood status as anything but a collective delusion. As for sleeping with the enemy…"

The observation that this is beyond bad form doesn't help the blush from spreading across his face.

"… you're not my enemy. And I'm not interested in playing those games." She says, "And you wouldn't like living with me, and you know it. I don't even think you could tolerate me for the duration of a respectable fling." She says, "Nor I you. Among other things, you're rigid and prudish about all sorts of things ..." She forebears to say the next thing, but he can almost hear her thinking it: _and I don't imagine you'd be much fun in bed_. He'd be insulted, except that suddenly he imagines it, that which had transpired with Pansy in awkward and tender silence, with this plain-spoken, brisk, practical person before him.

It's a chilly and deflating picture.

She says, "And I'm not bringing this up to be gratuitously hurtful, but I don't want any more of this … this _nonsense_." She says, "Andromeda Tonks thinks she may have found a solution to your dilemma, but it will be awkward if you're going to insist that you have some sort of attraction to me." She gathers herself and says, "No. Not awkward. Impossible."

He leans forward. "You have something?" Because it had seemed impossible; his mother's marriage contract is quite clear on the disposition of Squib offspring, and his sister is designated as a bearer of the Name if she should prove a witch, so adoption into another family is _not_ an option…

She said, "It's a contract. A very old form. No one's done it for centuries, certainly not since the Statute of Secrecy. It requires a willing Muggle signatory…" She pauses. "My parents are willing to take it on. But not if I'm not willing, and I'm _not_, if you're going to be stalking me and brooding about how I ought to _belong_ to you." She says, "And in any case, it has very specific clauses about what sort of relationship you may have with my family."

He knows he's staring, but can't help it.

"Muggle kings and queens didn't fancy the notion of the court wizard seducing their heirs, male or female. So there are magically binding requirements forbidding any kind of sexual relationship." She says, "The sanctions are really quite dire."

"So what do I have to gain from it?"

"Well, you remain the heir of your family, for one. But you have the option of placing any of your siblings or heirs under the protection of your Muggle patron." She says, "And it's a more ancient form, so my understanding is that it supersedes bindings of more recent date. I don't claim to understand how all of it works. You'll have to ask Andromeda. But the main thing is that Hypatia is protected, however things turn out."

He looks at his sister, sleeping in her nest of blankets. Outside the plate-glass window of the café, a thin spiteful sleet has begun to fall, giving the blue twilight a grimy look.

"She'd be safe?"

"As far as Andromeda can tell. Your isolationist ancestors didn't count on a descendant taking up a post of this sort again, so they didn't think to forbid it in the marriage contract."

The absurdity of it strikes him and he feels his mouth quirking into something like a smile. "So your parents would take me on … as their court wizard. In spite of being commoners."

"Nothing in the contract actually specifies that the Muggle signatory has to be royalty. The main point is that we'd be something like brother and sister." She smiles, though it's a bit strained. "There's been more than a bit of sibling rivalry already, if I'm to be frank."

"That would make Hypatia your niece."

She nods. "I think I'd be a better aunt than some." He shivers, remembering Bellatrix. "But I don't care for your attitude just now. I thought we'd worked things out, but you seem to be regressing of late."

Hypatia stirs, and he picks her up. There in the dim reflection in the plate-glass, the same vague reflection: a back view of the girl with the voluminous hair, the boy holding the baby, a happy little family, some might assume.

He knows that she overheard Zabini in the waiting room. "If this is about the noise that Zabini was making ..." She frowns for a minute, and then shakes her head.

"No. Not that I enjoy listening to his opinion of my looks. But he's right. You're not going to get your way on this one. I am not interested in you. Not that way."

He feels the tears prickle his eyes. Hypatia shifts in his arms and tugs at his hair. He disengages it from her fist. Otherwise, she'd have a lock of it in her fist by way of toy, and fall asleep that way. It really isn't fair, though. He's alone in the postwar. Even the defeated are pairing off, but he …

"He likes to annoy you, and anyway I don't think he's anyone to be taking very seriously. He's under suspicion for murdering his mother, but no one's been able to prove anything." He starts at her sheer bad form of saying it aloud. "He has his own problems, and he distracts himself from them by annoying you."

"I don't think that's any of your business."

"It wouldn't be my business at all, except that I'm mixed up in it." She said, "And your treatment of Pansy is no advertisement either." He glowers at her; how does she know about that? Has she been peeking at the records? She continues, "I don't know the particulars, but she can barely stand to be in the same room with you."

"And you assume it's my fault."

She looks at him, and says nothing.

At length she says, "And I'm not flattered by being sized up as breeding stock, either."

He thinks that's a rather vulgar way of putting it, and says so. "And who told you anyone was saying such a thing?"

"Andromeda Tonks. She said that your mother had said something to you about how she'd make my parents an offer if we weren't out of reach. Things have changed in the postwar, she said." Granger puts her cup down. "Your case isn't unique. The Purebloods are facing a genetic crisis. Suddenly your Housemates are marrying half-bloods. Would marry muggle-borns if they could." She stared at him. "So apparently now I'm desirable, and before I was beneath contempt, and in both cases for nothing to do with me personally."

She takes another sip of her drink and looks at him steadily over the rim of the tall glass. He looks at Hypatia, asleep in her bassinet, in the corner of the booth. "You've lived your whole life by other people's opinions. Have you _ever_ thought for yourself?" He feels the heat rising in his face. "You weren't interested in me before, except to taunt. And now that apparently your mother has decided that it's not so wise to continue the selective inbreeding, I suddenly have genetic cachet, so you resent me for being out of reach."

She says, "I don't know if you understand how serious this is. This contract is the _only_ thing Andromeda has found to circumvent your mother's marriage contract."

"Hypatia _could_ be a witch," Draco says, though of course he feels foolish. They wouldn't have gone this far if he really believed that.

Granger looks at him and says nothing. She picks up her glass and takes a long, considered sip, puts it down, and pushes it to one side.

"Everything is a gamble," she says, "but I thought we were agreed that you didn't want to bet and lose. The Statute of Secrecy narrows your choice of potential Muggle signatories. My parents are willing to do it. There aren't any other families of Muggle-borns who'd want to do with it." She adds, "They would have been dead if your father's Dark Lord had had his way."

Draco frowns.

"And I don't understand why you're all wound up about this, except that I'm off limits. You don't know me. You don't particularly like me. We don't have a lot in common."

Hypatia cuddles against him, and he drapes another blanket around her, to protect her from the cold draft that wafts through the booth as patrons open and close the door of the café.

He says, a propos of nothing, "A child needs two parents."

"She'll have them," Granger says. "She does already. She has you, and she has Andromeda. A brother and an aunt will do as well, if they're set on being father and mother. Andromeda tells me that Teddy adores his little cousin." Draco smiles in spite of himself.

She says, "Fatherhood becomes you, actually. I wouldn't have thought." He shakes his head. He wouldn't have thought, either.

He says, "But there's a duty to the Line. You don't understand…"

"I think you don't need to worry about that just now. Your first worry is Hypatia."

He thinks about that contract, about the sanctions that make Hermione Granger a foster-sister, which is to say, not a potential lover. He shifts Hypatia on his shoulder, where she regards him with sleepy eyes, and thinks about the feeling that takes him over when he imagines any sort of threat to her.

Finally he says, "Why are you doing this? Really, why?"

"It's the right thing. At least I think so. And … we owe you a life debt, at least by omission." She swallows, hard, stares at the table for a moment, then looks up to meet his eyes almost defiantly. "At the Manor. When they brought us in… you didn't identify Harry, or me either, really. It was your mother …" She leans in, and says, "I've wondered for months, actually. Did you know it was Harry?"

The last thing in the world he wants to remember.

He nods.

"And you stopped Crabbe killing us in the Room of Requirement. Even if it were for very much the wrong reasons." She says, "But life debts are payable in only one currency. I'm doing my best on this one. It doesn't include marrying you."

"What earthly use do your parents have for a court wizard?"

She shrugs. "They'll think of something. Or not. Surely you could cope with a sinecure."

"But the contract … What witch or wizard needs the protection of a _Muggle?"_

She looks at him with a slight smile, as if waiting for the penny to drop. It infuriates him, not least because it proves her right. He does find her infuriating, pretty chronically if he admits it.

He says, "It would seem to solve _your_ problem, of course. Keep me at arm's length forever."

She narrows her eyes at him, and bites her lip. She's conspicuously keeping both hands on the table — no reach for a wand — but even that feels like a threat. As her silence stretches out, he can hear the faint clatter in the kitchen, and the murmured conversations at other booths.

At length she says, "Malfoy, I wouldn't have thought you were this dense. Witches and wizards don't need the protection of Muggles… but their Squib kin do." She adds, "Andromeda found several contracts of this sort in the Black family archives. _Toujours pur_ is true only by a technicality." She smiles, the sort of smile that accompanies a firm _quod erat demonstratum_. "Kingsley found more examples on file at the Ministry, from defunct lines, and …"

"And what?" She has the air of someone about to burst from the effort of suppressing laughter.

"That's how your lot got the Manor in the first place. Geoffroy Alphonse Percival de Malfoy, also known as Geoffroy the Forsworn, signed such a contract with William Rufus. In return for _services rendered_, he got the grant of land for Malfoy Manor, and his Squib sister married a Norman knight." She says, "At least we assume Genevieve de Malfoy was a Squib, because it would appear that intermarriage with Muggles was frowned on even then."

Then she adds in her lecturer's manner, "It would appear that the practice of killing Squib offspring is _not_ consistently practiced in the Malfoy line until the Renaissance, which coincides with the rise of witch-hunting, an increase in wizarding isolationism, _and_ a turn back to classical models."

_You sound like a bloody textbook, and you don't have any right to talk about my family_. The words rise spontaneously and then die at the back of his throat. She didn't ferret that out; his _mother_ must have done so, with help from her blood-traitor sister. Apparently, his mother's marriage contract doesn't forbid ransacking the archives of the Manor.

Granger's smile is more like a smirk now. "Hypatia will be more than safe, we think. Though I'm afraid my parents aren't in a position to sponsor a marriage into the peerage. And in any case, that wouldn't mean what it did in Geoffroy's day."

If Longbottom can tolerate the prospect of_ that_ over breakfast every day for the next fifty years… well, it's not only Muggles who have perverse tastes. He frowns. "So what _are_ her prospects?"

"Well, if she's of a studious disposition, and works hard at school… and does well on her O-levels and A-levels …"

"Her what?"

"Like OWLs and NEWTs, only for Muggles. If she does well, she can go to university, and thence into a profession, depending on her inclinations, of course." Draco shakes his head. This is more Muggle Studies than he's up for just now, and the picture of his sister as a miniature Granger swot is just a little hard to take.

"There are other lines of work, too." She waves her hand vaguely. "Zabini's wanting to be an actor, I hear. I suppose your sister could pursue a career on the stage." She smirks. "If she's anything like her brother…"

Draco finishes his drink, which is bittersweet and stimulating. Muggle concoctions have their points, though really his nerves don't need any more jangling just now. He can't escape the conviction that she is laughing at him, and her notions of appropriate ambitions for Hypatia are nothing he recognizes. There is going to be a fight, more than one, on the subject of his sister's upbringing. Granger is not going to carry the field on _that_ question, not if he has anything to say about it.

He realizes that he's been narrowing his eyes, when Granger says, "You really would like to hex me, wouldn't you? And that's just in a conversation about how to keep your sister safe, which is something we've both agreed is a good thing." She says, "And I'm understating it to say we have unhappy history."

"But I apologized."

"Which was grace on your part, but it doesn't wipe out what happened. You were the first person to call me 'mudblood,' and that was the least of it." She picks up the menu, peruses it, puts it back down. "But I did mean it when I said I didn't want to be retailing our grudges for the next hundred years."

"You don't fancy me as a … you don't _fancy_ me, but you'd accept me as a brother. Knowing that I'd want to hex you at least once a week."

She shrugs. "Well, as long as you don't actually _do_ it. Ron and Ginny have an argument at least that often, and they'd tell you they get on fine as brother and sister." She says, "I don't actually know how the food is at this place. We didn't have time to try it."

"When were you here?"

"The day the Ministry fell. Dolohov and Rowle just missed capturing Harry." He can feel his color dropping; that was the first time, but by no means the last, that the Dark Lord enlisted him as torturer.

"Let's go somewhere else," she says. "I know a place that has an _excellent_ shepherd's pie." She reaches across the table and touches his hand. Her fingertips are cool. "You don't have to make up your mind right away, of course. It _is_ awkward. I've held off talking to Harry and Ron about it."

She puts on her coat and pays the tab, as Draco contemplates yet another unwelcome twist in his sister's rescue. As they push through the doors of the café onto the impossibly noisy street, he says, "That contract would make them …"

"They're _already_ your cousins. I've been looking at enough Pureblood genealogies lately… it's third cousins or closer, you and Harry." She says, "And yes, I know that cousins doesn't mean friends." He remembers that Andromeda's daughter Nymphadora, his own first cousin, died at the hand of her own aunt —and his. Bellatrix Lestrange had vowed to prune the family tree, and she was a woman of her word. "And brothers and sisters can hate each other in earnest."

He says, "Your parents would be willing? Even after … _all that?"_ By which he means the war, and the fact that his father's people – no, his father, and his aunt, and possibly his mother – more than willingly would have killed them, and not mercifully.

"My mother was _very_ impressed by how much you cared for your mother and sister. She told me that she wouldn't mind being on the right side of your family feeling."

ooo

**Author's notes:**

The disposition of literary properties, or credit where credit is due:

How the Malfoys got their Manor: by way of A. J. Hall in _Dissipation and Despair,_ though Geoffroy and Genevieve are my invention, as are some of the details of the court wizard's contract.

Audrey Tonks (whom some may know from _In Which the Princess Rescues the Dragon_) does appear to be _that_ Audrey. I should have suspected as much when she was coy about the question in the beginning.

As previously noted, this version of Blaise Zabini was originally written by Silver Sailor Ganymede. The green eye-shadow is Ganymede-canon, as are the crush on Theo Nott and the brief liaison with Pansy; the Slytherin Old School Tie is mine.


	31. Chapter 31

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

"Well, how did it go?"

Hermione hangs her coat on the coat stand before she turns to her mother. "As well as could be expected, I suppose." Now that she's home, she realizes just how tired she is.

The look on Neville's face is pure relief.

"I took him to Charing Cross Road, and then I stood him dinner at Eddie Tonks' pub." She smirks. "I didn't realize that Draco Malfoy could be bribed with the prospect of a good shepherd's pie."

A lucky thing, too, because Eddie's pub is one of the safest locations in muggle London. There's always one or two off-duty Aurors hanging about the place, and she'd wanted to have the rest of the conversation in a place where she had backup. Philippa Bones and Octavian Diggory had been there already, drinking pints and playing darts in the front room, with a clear line of sight to their booth.

Neville says, "So it went well."

She sits down next to him, and relaxes. His warmth next to her is reassuring.

"Halfway through the conversation, he realized he was having more fun arguing with me about what school Hypatia was to attend…" She smiles. "He thinks we're altogether middle-class in merely aspiring to Oxbridge. If she's to go Muggle, he wants to her go first class. After I told him about Genevieve, he got a bee in his bonnet about an aristocratic marriage. I had to remind him about the whole bearer-of-the-name business, and he said, 'Well, that's only if she's a witch,' and then went on to ask about Finch-Fletchley, if his people were sufficiently posh."

Neville says, "But Finch-Fletchley's engaged to Hannah Abbott."

"I don't know how Draco found out about the engagement, but he wants me to put in a word for him with Hannah, in case their first-born is a boy." She adds, "She turned up to Eddie's pub, as it happens. They've been talking shop, I gather, on the running of a wizarding pub."

Neville stares at her for a moment, and then starts to laugh. "Oh, my," he says.

"Oh my indeed. Hannah and Justin aren't yet married, and Draco wants to put in a bid on a marriage contract, on spec. A Half-blood with ties to the Muggle aristocracy would be more than acceptable, whether or not Hypatia is a witch. Then he was asking if Justin had any brothers or sisters with sons of an appropriate age."

Augusta Longbotton has been watching this the whole time, with an amused expression. "Aye, that's the Malfoys I know. Always an eye to brass or advantage. You know I got a marriage proposal from our Draco's great-grandfather." She smirks. "Not a romantic lot. 'My girl, we're the best breeding stock in wizarding Britain. It's only natural you should marry me.' That in the midst of Quidditch practice."

Hermione laughs aloud, and her mother asks, "So what did you tell him?" Neville is smiling; he already knows this story. "Why, I told him a reserve Seeker was no match for a champion Beater, and knocked him off his broom again. It's not the place to bandy words, a hundred feet above the pitch."

Hermione giggles, hearing the high notes of hysteria in it. "Then I should be thankful I didn't have to work particularly hard to convince him that he didn't want to face my encyclopedic observations over breakfast every morning for the next century."

Neville reaches across and squeezes her hand. "A fate worse than death."

She smiles. "Only a shade less horrifying than facing down the Dark Lord, I would imagine." She shakes her head. "On the other hand, if we do marry, than you'll be stuck with Draco Malfoy as a brother-in-law."

Andromeda speaks for the first time. "Kingsley and I will begin drafting the petition."

Hermione nods. The hard part, in her mind, has been convincing Draco to see reason, but after that will come the tedious process of petitioning the Wizengamot. No court wizard's contract has been signed for some six centuries; the last such was concluded in the time of the later Crusades, with a Muggle aristocrat who sought an extra layer of protection for his ventures on the Silk Road. Nowadays the Statute of Secrecy must be taken in consideration. The case is helped, Andromeda reports, by the prospective signatories' prior knowledge of the wizarding world; that they are the parents of Hermione Granger is not anticipated to hurt, either.

"Well, I suppose if this goes through, you won't be going back to Australia," Hermione says to her mother.

"Oh no, we decided some time ago." Hermione's mother smiles, a sly expression that echoes Andromeda's look. "Things are ever so much more exciting here. I'm quite curious as to how all of this is going to turn out."

Hermione's father says, "I suppose it's all very well as a legal dodge—rather clever, I should say—but what are we going to do with a court wizard?"

Hermione says, "There will be some restrictions, of course. No weather-working, nothing that's a Statute of Secrecy violation, no Dark Magic…"

"Certainly not. This is a respectable neighborhood. What would the neighbors think if we had one of your school friends practicing necromancy?"

William says, "Are you _sure_ about that weather-working provision? Just a little, for the roses…"

Hermione glares at both of them, until the expression on Andromeda's face tells her that they're having her on.

Andromeda says, "We can work that out later. First things first." It's so much her mother's tone, that she wonders that she ever saw any resemblance between Andromeda and Bellatrix. It settles on her that it's over, and it's all she can do not to slouch in the armchair; she's restrained by the example of Andromeda's effortlessly erect posture.

Instead she says, "It's a task, trying to talk sense to Draco Malfoy."

Neville smiles. "But you managed it."

"With much biting of the tongue," she says. "I think he heard 'no' from me more times in an afternoon than from his mother in the whole time she's known him." She can feel the hysterical laughter bubbling up in her chest.

Neville looks at Hermione's mother, and then to his grandmother. Augusta Longbottom nods, with magisterial decision. "I think you've more than earned this." Hermione's mother stands up and goes into the kitchen, followed by Andromeda Tonks. It isn't until they started handing round the tumblers that Hermione understands what they are about. Madam Longbottom pours out two or three fingers of firewhiskey in each glass.

"We're all of age here," she says, with a glance at her grandson, the junior of the company. "Sense has been talked, then."

"And actually heard," Hermione says. She accepts a tumbler and adds, "With rapture, on my part. Well, modified rapture. He nearly wore me down with questions about the strings that were going to be pulled for his sister." She knocks back her glass with abandon, and nearly chokes as the fire reaches her sinuses.

"Eh, lass, that's not water," Madam Longbottom says.

"He has rather a lot of nerve," Hermione says. "As if he were doing me a favor, agreeing that no _did_ mean no. Because, really, if he hadn't, I would have hexed him right there, and there wouldn't have been a question of his duties to the Line." She smiles, and Neville smiles in return. If that smile mirrors hers, her own is rather satisfactorily predatory. "I'm not sure if Malfoy is more of a trial now that he's semi-reformed…" She looks at Andromeda, "With all due respect, your sister's notions of child-rearing…"

"You'll have no disagreement from me. Cissy was exceedingly indulgent, though in view of her experience it makes some amount of sense."

"He doesn't think of anyone but himself, or him and his." She takes another sip of the last of her Firewhiskey, and Madam Longbottom gives her a quelling look. "All right, I won't make the mistake of drinking and talking about Malfoy at the same time. He kept insisting that if I were trying to change the law, it must be for the sake of my grand passion for him personally, and that was the only plausible or decent answer."

Her mother adds, "I did say he wasn't much on general principles."

The full force of the dose of Firewhiskey begins to hit her, and she knows perfectly well that it's loosening her tongue. "I suppose I ought to be touched at all the family feeling, but it's strictly Malfoys only with him. Nobody outside the family circle really counts." She knows she's going too far, but says it anyway. "His mother was the one who identified me, you know. Perfectly happy to sacrifice me to get them in the clear." She leans back in the chair, looking at the light in her tumbler. "And now he's going to be my foster-brother. Ugh. _Virtue_ must be its own reward…"

Neville leans across and kisses her on the cheek. "But that means _you'll_ be in his family circle."

She pulls a face at that, and finishes the glass of liquor.

ooo

By the time that Draco returned to the Manor, Hypatia was fussing and wriggling. It wasn't only that she was getting hungry; she was plainly over-stimulated from so many strangers picking her up and talking to her. There had been cousin Audrey, to whom Hypatia was quite partial, and then Hannah Abbot, whom she decided wasn't bad either. Hermione – with whom he was going to have to be on given names because she was shortly to be his foster-sister, if all went well with the petition to the Wizengamot – well, Hermione mostly kept aloof, not that the other two weren't doing a fine job of making much of his sister. And then Eddie Tonks – whom he found it odd still to address as Uncle Eddie – came over to greet Draco and the little one, and she kept her good humor with visible effort.

There was politicking to be done, and he engaged Hannah Abbot in a hypothetical conversation about marriage prospects, which Abbot seemed to find odd.

He didn't miss the fact that the Aurors, Bones and Diggory, kept him well in sight even as they played their game of darts and sipped the exotic Muggle drinks. He declined Audrey's offer of a pint; his aunt Andromeda might claim to find butterbeer cloying, but Draco liked his drinks and his treats both to be sweet.

Abbott had made a particularly strange face when he'd raised the question of Finch-Fletchley's antecedents in the Muggle world. As usual, it was plain-spoken Audrey Tonks who said it. "You haven't shown an interest before, I'd guess," she said. "So, you're trying to marry off the little one before she's even out of nappies." He glared at her. Muggles – or at any rate, the ones he found among his relatives by marriage – were vulgarly explicit about _everything_.

"Oh, don't look at me in that tone of voice, Draco," Audrey said. "It's not a good look on you. Puts me in mind of a ferret with indigestion."

Hannah Abbot giggled, and Draco felt his face heat. Even at the distance of more than four years, he didn't like to be reminded of that particular incident.

Audrey looked at him and raised an eyebrow, and then she and Hannah both collapsed in giggles, which hilarity his sister seemed to approve, at least to the extent of waving her arms about and trying out her own laugh. Hypatia's laugh was rather a work in progress, somewhere between a squawk and a snort.

Even his baby sister was laughing at him.

Hermione kept aloof, for the most part, and even shot him a glance that seemed sympathetic. Of the pair of them, Granger and Longbottom, it turned out that Longbottom was the one to whom small children gravitated. He wondered if Granger ever really had been a small child herself, or if she'd always been the somewhat pedantic miniature adult he remembered from their first encounter on the Hogwarts Express.

He wished Longbottom joy of it, if he did end up married to Granger. He supposed that they were better suited … at any rate, he had more to think about than romance, at the moment. There was politics, the matter of redeeming the family name, and that was a twenty-year task. Memories were long in the wizarding world; Slughorn the Potions master still held the Malfoy family in ill regard for things dating back to the turn of the twentieth century, when he'd been at Hogwarts with Draco's great-grandfather.

It would be twenty years until his father was out of prison, parole not being an option… Not that Lucius Malfoy would have anything to say about his daughter's fate until she was well past her majority. She'd be twenty years old when he got out of prison.

That brings him back to the present matter.

Hypatia has begun to talk, and she called him "papa", and he's encouraged her in the practice.

ooo

Draco knows that there's no deceiving anyone in the wizarding world about his sister's parentage, because it was a matter of discussion in the _Prophet_ for months, but in the Muggle world, he's already had a few encounters that have left him with the temptation to elide the matter. When he's out and about in Muggle London, in his aunt's company or on his own with the baby, he's overheard older people remarking tenderly on the young father and his child. In his rather formal Muggle clothes, he passes for a few years older than his actual age.

Once or twice, disconcertingly, he's looked up to see Muggle girls eyeing him. The baby helps, it would seem.

Audrey teases him about it from time to time. "They think you're a nice boy, and you've already proving you'd be a good father. If you're not careful, you'll find yourself awash in offers." She gracefully glides over the point they both know: he's very far from a _nice boy_, and his father would have an apoplectic fit if his Heir married a Muggle.

It's confusing. Everything is confusing.

ooo

His mother looks at him gravely.

"Andromeda tells me that Miss Granger spoke with you."

Draco nods.

"I told you that they were out of reach."

"_Everyone's_ out of reach. And don't go on about cousin Audrey. She fancies Percy Weasley."

His mother sighs, with a ghost of a shrug, and continues to nurse Hypatia.

He's not going to tell her about the conversation between Audrey and Hannah, in which they giggled over the boys they fancied. There's something disconcerting about being in the company of women talking about what they find attractive in men. Audrey likes Percy's red hair and the way he turns pink when he's talking passionately, and his slim wiry frame … well, she did have modesty enough not to get into detail about what she'd like to do with him, but from the sparkle in her eye, Draco has a good idea. Hannah was somewhat more reticent, but she did talk about Justin's curly hair and sweet smile.

And then the both of them turned to Hermione and talked about how Neville had turned out quite fanciable indeed, if one had more robust tastes.

Hermione turned bright red. Draco would have laughed at her, except he suspected that his face was a similar color.

The other thing he doesn't want to remember is Hannah Abbott's first glance at him. She flinched, just visibly, and then recovered herself. Yes, her parents had been killed by Death Eaters, and Draco's father had been a Death Eater. Nonetheless, the trials had made it a matter of public record that Draco himself had been rather conspicuously inept in that line.

Well, and Abbott was doing business, so to speak, with his Muggle cousin. It was no secret what her apprenticeship to the keeper of the Leaky meant; old Tom was thinking of retirement and looking for a successor. Meanwhile, Eddie Tonks' pub had apparently been a place of resort for the younger generation of the Auror Corps, at least since the time of his cousin Dora.

That did explain the pictures on the wall above the bar: Dora, in a rare Muggle snapshot, and a pencil portrait of Remus Lupin, after a wizarding photograph, he was told; and then there was a Muggle studio photograph of Kingsley Shacklebolt in full Muggle rig, as part of the entourage of the Muggle Minister. There was even an ancient black-and-white photograph that he recognized as a very much younger Alastor Moody, undercover as a Muggle air raid warden.

That was from the days of the Grindelwald War, Audrey had explained. The nonchalance with which his Muggle cousin would cite bits of wizarding lore still gave him a start.

Oh yes, and he didn't exaggerate when he said that Audrey was spoken for - or rather, she'd put in a claim, a rather conspicuous one, on Percy Weasley. The look on her face when he walked into Eddie's pub left very little to the imagination: her eyes brightened, and her face lit to incandescence, her cheeks pink and the brilliance of her smile nearly outshining the twinkle in her eye. If Weasley didn't know that she fancied him, he was one of nature's own fools.

Audrey is very definitely _not his type_ but he wouldn't mind if someone looked at him like that.

ooo

Meanwhile, there's business to be discussed. Andromeda and Kingsley—yes, that's Minister Shacklebolt—are beginning the process of drafting the petition to the Wizengamot, and the thing that gives him pause is that his mother will have to give testimony.

She lifts her chin and looks at him with cold dignity. "Of course," she says. "The post-war is full of disagreeable necessities." She doesn't need to remind him that she's already testified before the Wizengamot, in rather less pleasant circumstances: as an accused accessory to the Dark Lord. Even in Azkaban grey, she cut an impressive figure.

He frowns. "And what about father?"

"Your father's opinion of the matter is rather beside the point," she says.

Draco knows that under the new regime at Azkaban, the prisoners are permitted to receive not only letters but newspapers as well. There will be no question but that his father will read about it in the _Prophet_.

He frowns. "So you've discussed it with him?"

"What your father and I discuss is none of your affair, Draco."

He shrugs. She can pretend that he's still the child of the house, but he knows better. And in any case, she's right. It really doesn't matter what his father has to say about Hypatia.

Draco watches his mother nurse Hypatia, and wonders just how much of a part she's going to take once the child is weaned. He narrows his eyes, thinking just how oddly this has played out… she did give him the vital information about the marriage contract, after all, on the way to telling him why he wasn't to marry another Pureblood, that she'd decided single-handedly to upend previous practice, indeed to resign their Pureblood status for the coming generations.

The whole thing makes him dizzy, actually. How much had she been swayed by her renegade sister? Well, he oughtn't to complain about aunt Andromeda, because she'd been a help and support, but nonetheless…

Andromeda had been the one who'd offered him the option of being the foster-father, knowing Hypatia's likely squibhood. Yes, there's no question in his mind but that she'd known, well, guessed at least, to judge from what she'd said of her refusal to help his mother to fulfill the terms of her marriage contract.

And if he'd known all that in the beginning, would he have said yes?

Hypatia has fallen asleep, nestled in the folds of her mother's cloak, and by candlelight they look like a marble composition of mother and child, all that's holy in the Pureblood way of life.

His mother smiles slightly, looking down at the little one sleeping against her heart, and then looks up and meets his eyes. Yes. There's no doubt that they're united in the same conspiracy. If she was willing to risk the ire of the Dark Lord for his sake, then defying her husband on behalf of his sister is a relatively small matter.

For that matter, she likely asked her sister to render the traditional sisterly aid in the matter of squib offspring, knowing that she'd refuse… well, she could plead, then, that she'd been faithful to the forms. A good Slytherin to the last, and it wasn't her fault that the only force on earth that could prevail against a daughter of the House of Black was another such. Well, leaving Molly Weasley out of the picture, in the matter of his late aunt Bellatrix, because Bellatrix was a different case entirely, and not one he cares to contemplate even now.

ooo


	32. Chapter 32

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

On this grey morning in early December, Hermione frowns at her reflection before the mirror in her parents' front hall. She has long since become accustomed to seeing herself in medieval regalia, but the sight of her parents behind her, in petitioners' robes, sets her back in spite of the previous rehearsals.

They _do_ look distinguished, and she finally understands Draco's remark that her mother looks as if she might be a rather accomplished Legilimens.

Elizabeth had smiled at that, and said, "No, only practice as a parent. Your own mother does the same, though no doubt magic helps."

He'd frowned in the way one would on unexpectedly encountering clear glass where air ought to be. _Draco collides with reality_, she called that look.

And yes, they are long since on first names. She'd never really thought about what it might be like to have siblings… no, she'd had the thought at the Burrow, more than once, but she'd never imagined the sort of brother or sister she might have had, because that wasn't the universe in which she lived.

If today's hearing succeeds, she will have a brother who doesn't in the least resemble her… well, that's not the way to think of it. Think, rather, of the injustice and danger averted, and the precedent set.

Her father looks particularly fine in the dark robes, trimmed with a rich fur collar. Her parents had debated the question of a haircut—the same conversation they have this time every year, when he insists that the mane will keep his head warm, and her mother says that he's looking shaggy. This year the decision is rather different: the mane will look _distinguished._ In the wizarding world, long hair is eminently correct on men and women alike.

William adjusts his steel-rimmed spectacles on his nose, and shakes out the pleats so that the robe drapes smoothly. Excepting the spectacles, he looks like a solemn courtier in a Holbein portrait.

Hermione closes her hands nervously over the blue beaded bag that no longer holds _everything_, only everything that's needed for the hearing.

With a soft _pop_, Andromeda Tonks materializes in the front room, looking discomfited. A discreet arrival is necessary because the Grangers aren't on the Floo System, but it's clear that Andromeda's Pureblood sensibilities still aren't up to Apparition on the wrong side of the threshold.

Hermione takes a deep breath, and offers her arm to her father; Andromeda echoes the gesture. Elizabeth accepts, and says to Andromeda, "It will be quite all right," though she's cut off mid-sentence by the compression of space in the immediate vicinity.

They rematerialize in the foyer of the vast courtroom. Hermione shivers. It's the chamber that Umbridge used during the war, for the hearings of the Muggle-born Registration Commission… no, she will not think about that. It's only a courtroom, and Umbridge is long since consigned to Azkaban for life.

Narcissa is standing on the other side of the antechamber, in a severer version of her usual mourning garb; she looks like a barrister, less the wig. Her moon-pale hair hangs down her back in a long swaying sheet. Draco stands behind her, looking paler than usual and even a little sick. She can't say she blames him. So much hangs on the outcome of the procedure. He'd be pacing and wringing his hands, no doubt, if he weren't holding Hypatia, who is dressed in a miniature copy of his black robes. Her hair hangs loose around her face, and Hermione notices that it's come in thicker than before, or maybe that's the effect of it not being constrained in pigtails. She's certainly picked up on the solemnity of the occasion, and she's rather more subdued than usual.

Kingsley puts in his appearance last of all. He will be representing them before the wizards' court, both in his capacity as Minister and as the sponsor of the contract. He has with him the necessary volumes, though Hermione has brought with her a full set of duplicates of all the necessary files.

It's a full sitting of the wizards' court, and room has been made as well for a spectators' section. All of the living kin of the petitioners have been seated: in a moment, Andromeda Tonks will be seating herself next to Harry Potter, to represent the House of Black. Teddy Lupin sits restively on his godfather's lap. Ginny sits next to Harry rather than with her own family, as the godmother. Ron, Bill and George are present, along with Arthur and Molly. Percy is involved as well, attendant on the Minister. Augusta and Neville are flanked by a selection of the Lancashire kin: Algie and Enid, and a couple in rather consciously archaic robes.

"Harfang and Callidora," Andromeda whispers to her. "It's an occasion… though the Longbottoms and the Blacks have crossed a few times before, it's never involved the Malfoys." Then she goes to take her place, because they will begin in a few minutes, just as soon as Madam Marchbanks arrives.

It hadn't occurred to her just how many families are being stitched together if the petition is granted; Augusta will be taking on Draco as something like a grandson-in-law, and the absent Lucius with him… well, that doesn't bear thinking about. She knows that Augusta has never held Lucius in much esteem… well, and nearer to home, there are Harry and Ron looking at her. Harry has his bemused look on (when he's not keeping Teddy from wriggling excessively) and Ron has that faintly gobsmacked look that hasn't ever left his face since she broke the news to them. He understands the spirit of the thing, of course, but the sheer effect of it… well, and she can only imagine how Arthur looks at the matter.

There's no call for her to be so nervous. Kingsley will be taking the better part of the business. Her part in the traditional ritual is all but nonexistent.

Kingsley is brokering the business, and her parents know their lines. Narcissa is standing regent for the House of Malfoy, but her only part is to consent to the contract for which her son is petitioning. In principle, he could proceed without his mother's permission, although for the full effect on her marriage contract, her consent is required.

Hermione takes a deep breath and lets it out. These are all things she knows already, and the only reason that she's reviewing the whole thing in her head is that she's nervous, and the whole business is minutes from being underway. Everyone is rehearsed; there will be no outcries from the spectators' section that objection is made.

Nonetheless.. she looks across to Draco, who's jiggling Hypatia on his hip to calm her, as she makes a play for the silver clasps on his robe. At least she's not tugging on his hair, she thinks. He looks up, and the apprehension on his face makes it look paler and thinner than usual.

Madam Marchbanks enters and calls the court to order, and there is no more time to think. The most difficult part has finished: the conference with her friends.

ooo

Late November, and the wind would be rattling the panes at Hogwarts. Here, in the suburbs of London, the dead leaves blow by the modern window-panes without a sound.

Hermione takes her mother's new electric kettle off its stand and pours hot water into the teapot. She says, addressing none of them in particular, "Well, there's no putting it off."

Neville smiles a bit nervously, and her mother nods judiciously. Her father rummages in the cupboards for the extra packets of biscuits. Tea, then, for six or seven additional guests. It seemed the best way to make the announcement, but now she's getting nervous.

Her mother says, "We'll need an extra leaf to the table." Andromeda nods, waving her wand to move the case files off the table.

Draco shakes his head, and hands Hypatia over to Elizabeth. "Allow me."

He waves his wand with a rather showy swish and flick, and the table stretches and changes shape. Draco's Transfiguration form is rather good, actually; he must have been practicing. Elizabeth frowns as the table not merely lengthens, but grows massive and heavy-legged, like some medieval piece one might see at a manor house that's been a Gracious Home since Norman times. The carvings on the legs shape themselves to cradle a shield whose figures rearrange themselves as Draco thinks out the matter.

Elizabeth says, in a tone that has the faintest touch of _quelling: _"Now, Draco, you know perfectly well we don't have a coat of arms."

He says, "Now you do." One more flick of the wand, and the tabletop has acquired the sort of mirror sheen that's not possible short of generations of varnishing and waxing. "If you have a court wizard, then you have a coat of arms."

Hermione doesn't say aloud that the matter's not yet decided. She's not sure in what direction her superstition should run: should they take it for granted, or should they be cautious lest the fates think them presumptuous? What will be will be, in any case. Really, at this point it's out of her hands, or anyone's. She's done all she can, and they've prepared the press.

Now all that remains is to explain to her friends what's going to play out, and to ask them, as her friends, not to object, at least in the public part of the ritual.

ooo

Harry arrives first, with Teddy. Ginny will be a little later, he says, as she's coming from practice with the Harpies and will want to stop at the Burrow to freshen up. Ron and Lavender come through the Floo a few minutes later, and then Luna puts in an appearance, smiling in her usual abstracted way.

Draco is in the kitchen, seeing to the last details, and she'd wager, taking deep breaths and trying to calm himself. Elizabeth brings out the tea things on a large silver tray (another of Draco's Transfiguration showpieces). If this does go through, she'll have to have a word with Draco _sub rosa_ about the distinction between his taste and her mother's. No doubt it's a product of his upbringing, but Draco's notion of the House Beautiful is very far from modern.

William comes down the stairs and greets Harry and Ron, and there's handshakes all around, and much exclaiming over Teddy, who has grown quite a bit since the summer.

Teddy smiles at one and all and flashes through his repertoire of hair and eyes, then lights on the biscuits with the inimitable expression of a small child in the presence of treats.

Tea is poured and handed all around, and then once Ginny arrives, her spiky copper-colored hair still damp from her bath, there's a second round. Draco and Hypatia emerge from the kitchen. Neville pulls out a chair for Draco to sit down with his little charge, who immediately smiles and gabbles something unintelligible at her cousin Teddy.

Harry frowns at Draco, but more in puzzlement than hostility. Ginny raises an eyebrow.

Ron says, "Malfoy."

Draco inclines his head briefly, and looks him in the eye. "Weasley."

She resists the urge to say, _Boys,_ because really it's so much like two gunslingers facing off in a Western. All gruff masculinity and good form, and it doesn't sit well either on slight blond Draco or gangly ginger Ron.

She says, "It's good to see you all."

Luna says, "Thank you for inviting us. And Draco. It must be something to do with the case, isn't it? You're all rather out of sorts." She frowns. "And that with nary a Nargle in sight." She says that last in a way that redounds immediately to the credit of Elizabeth and William, that as Muggles they manage a house free of supernatural pests they can't even see.

She says, "Yes, it's about the case." Into the deep water all in one dive, then. Better than tiptoeing into the shallows and freezing by degrees. "Luna's right. It's about the case. We have a petition before the Wizengamot to rectify the situation with Draco's mother's marriage contract."

Ron frowns. (She reminds herself that she'll be doing well if it's only frowns by the end of the business.) "I thought Kingsley was going to ask the Wizengamot to ban that sort of thing."

"Well, yes, but that's only going forward. The contract in question won't be affected, because the Wizengamot has made clear that _ex post facto_ measures aren't practicable with existing contracts. Not that there actually are all that many of that sort of contract…" With Draco in the room, she doesn't want to say it the way she does behind closed doors.

She takes a deep breath.

Ron goes pale. "Don't tell me you're going to have to marry Malfoy, or something."

Neville shakes his head with a grim little smile, and pats her hand under the table. She takes the reassurance, and continues, "No, Ron. Nothing that radical. Well, at least not radical that way." (That conversation with Draco about his unseemly crush must have taken, because he's looking a bit greenish around the gills, or maybe it's the prospect of the wrath of Weasley that does that.)

"Madam Tonks and Minister Shacklebolt found a solution, but it's rather archaic." She says, "I'm not quite sure how to explain it…"

Elizabeth Granger says, "If I may, Hermione." She says, "You've heard of King Arthur and Merlin, no doubt." Ron looks at her and nods, as does Luna. Frankly, she suspects Luna of knowing the whole thing and just keeping quiet, from the dreamy look on her face. "Well, it's a more recent form of the contract – for one thing, it's written – but we will be petitioning the Wizengamot to take on Draco as our court wizard."

Harry's mouth drops open, as does Ron's. Well, at least they're quiet. For now. Until the shock wears off.

Luna nods, her expression unchanged. Ginny actually smirks. Actually, Hermione would suspect her of storing up the tale for her mother. Molly Weasley would be going through her shelf of books on housekeeping charms, so that Draco wouldn't make a mess of things.

Now that the ice is broken, Hermione takes up the theme. "If the Wizengamot grants the petition, then Draco will put Hypatia under my parents' sponsorship."

Draco adds, "So if she turns out a Squib, they'll be able to help us with the marriage alliance."

Harry makes a face. "Er, Malfoy, I think your information may be a bit out of date. For England, anyway."

Draco ruffles a bit, then catches himself. "Potter." A pause, then he says, "Of course Hypatia can marry whom she likes. But it's always good to have proper guidance in the matter." He glances deferentially toward Elizabeth Granger as he says this, carefully not making eye contact with Andromeda, who certainly didn't turn to any Pureblood's notion of _proper guidance_ in the question of her own choice of husband.

Andromeda nods. "And there's the matter of her schooling, of course. I think a Muggle primary school would be the best choice, all in all. But that's for later."

Harry says, "That's bizarre. Hiring Malfoy as a court wizard."

A silence falls. At length she says, "Draco, I think it might work best if you stepped out a moment." Elizabeth nods, and takes Hypatia. William says to Draco, "We'll sit in the study."

Once the door had closes behind William and Draco, Hermione turns to the five of them: Harry and Ron, Ginny and Luna. Neville looks at her inquiringly. She says, "I can't say it in front of him… but." She looks down. "I had no idea."

It comes out in a whisper. "He's not an only child." She says, "It's not hypothetical, any of it, the part about killing squibs. So we're doing this dodge, this court wizard's contract. Like something out of a television comedy, isn't it? Some sort of magical creature comes to the suburbs…" She turns up her hands in her lap, staring at them. "They're not even sure how to interpret some of the forms. Things have changed. Even if Nicholas Flamel were still alive, I'm not sure he'd be able to help. This was old when he was born. The last one was over six hundred years ago. So Kingsley and Andromeda and I have been trying to negotiate how to do this. My parents aren't royalty, or even gentry, so they don't have a court or camp-followers even. Draco has very few living relatives who would approve of this sort of thing, so we had to set up Narcissa as the one to sign off on it. And you.., the five of you, they decided you were close enough to qualify as my sworn brothers and sisters in arms. So you're standing in for my … " she pauses over the word, because it's so absurd. ".. my court. Or my parents' court." She says, "And mercifully Draco is of age, though we still need Narcissa to approve of him placing Hypatia under my parents' protection."

She pauses, feeling dizzy. Yes, the press has prepared the ground but there's very little that feels prepared, now that she's said to her friends: _we're adopting Draco Malfoy_. They've faced him down every year for seven years… and now they're trying to protect him. No, not him. His baby sister, for reasons that are completely a point of principle. She's undertaking this bond, but so are her friends.

"It's the last marriage contract of its kind where children are at issue," she says. "There are others, but those couples are either both dead, both in Azkaban, or separated…" _by death or by the walls of Azkaban_, she doesn't need to spell out.

"So this is the last one. If all goes well, there will never be one like this again. The Wizengamot is deliberating on it, but Kingsley says it's most likely they'll decide on abolition. The last months, with the clinic, that's made an impression on them." She says, "We've been able to face each other, and _them_, and it feels as if the war is over." Lavender looks at her, and the dead light of November catches in the silver scars on her face. "The post-war, that won't ever be over, I think."

Ron nods, and swallows hard. Ginny and Harry clasp hands.

She says, "But you all have to agree. That's what they're going to ask in the hearing: do you agree, or at least do you not object. If any one of you objects, it invalidates the petition." She says, "They didn't want their people going into hostile situations, I think. There's more than one court wizard on record who was poisoned. So they tried to be sure that the contract was voluntary. After all, the king or queen isn't the only voice at court." She adds, "And this predates any notion of an absolute monarch."

Ron says, "So… you said that it makes you and Malfoy – relatives."

"Foster brother and sister, actually. Yes. More so that he can't marry me. They didn't want wizard-Muggle marriages. And on the other side, the Muggle princes didn't want the court wizard interfering with their heirs. So that's it."

"That's bizarre," Harry repeats. She nods. It is.

She knows she gets garrulous under stress, but she continues anyway. "It's more like adoption than marriage. If we're successful, then Draco is taken into the family, I mean my family, on this side of the border, so in point of wizarding law, we're, ah, foster-siblings, and of course the binding affects all of our kin, both sides of the family, so it's a kind of alliance I suppose." She takes a deep breath. "And anyway I didn't think it should be too much of a problem since you're cousins anyway."

They're all silent just then, and Hermione hopes that the ground has been prepared with the press coverage, especially in the _Quibbler,_ so that everyone knows what's at stake for Hypatia. Harry looks from Teddy to Hypatia, obviously enough, and his arms close protectively around his godson.

"If it were Teddy," he says, "I'd want him protected."

Ginny says, "Does that mean we have to see him, ah, socially?"

Andromeda cuts in, her grown-up's manner unmistakable. "All we're asking is that you not raise an objection to the petition." She says, "The only real binding is that my sister's marriage contract is superseded as regards Hypatia, and Hermione and Draco are siblings in the eyes of the law. Which really means that they _can't_ marry, or anything of the sort."

Ginny smirks and says, "I'm sure that's an enormous relief to both of them." She's apparently considering the comic possibilities, for her smirk widens into a grin as she adds, "Neville too."

Teddy wriggles in Harry's lap, growing restive, and Harry releases him to toddle among the chairs. He's very much more steady on his feet now. The awkward silence persists, as everyone pretends to be watching his progress, first toward Crookshanks, who absents himself, and then toward his baby cousin, who greets him with a squawk and some noises that seem to be groping their way toward English.

Neville breaks the silence. "I won't raise an objection."

Ginny shrugs. "If that's all there is… well, I suppose not me either."

Harry shakes his head. "Not me either. Just as long as you're sure."

Ron stretches out his legs, as if he's been sitting in the chair for hours, and takes a long sip of his tea, looking first at Hermione, and then at Hypatia. He shakes his head. "Daftest thing I've ever heard." Lavender elbows him discreetly.

Luna says, "Of course." _Of course,_ because she knows the case forward and back, as the de facto assistant editor of the resurrected _Quibbler._

Andromeda says, "Of course you'll want to go home and think on it." She adds, "And once you've made up your mind, we'll want your sworn oath."

No fool she, Hermione thinks.

"Fair enough," Ron says. Lavender smiles at him, and then at Teddy, who's listening with a thoughtful face to Hypatia's excited gabble.

ooo

When the consensus has been reached, Andromeda gets up to fetch Draco. He re-enters the room, dead-white and tense as he has not been since facing the Wizengamot as an accused war criminal.

Hermione says to him, "They've agreed." They nod all around, and Draco relaxes.

Ron says to Draco, "The war's over. First thing after the hearing, you're coming to the Burrow with us." He and Ginny exchange a conspiratorial look. "Mum would insist on it. Good manners and all, _cousin._"

Hermione doesn't even want to know what _that's_ about.

Draco nods, and shakes hands with Ron, and then says to Harry, "Potter," only not with the same animus as before. "You were frightfully decent at the trial. And this is above and beyond."

Harry offers his hand, and suddenly Draco looks as if he might burst into tears. Instead, he stands up even straighter, accepts the handshake, and says, "Thank you," and adds, "Cousin."

ooo

Then there was the political dimension. She didn't mention to her friends just how flimsy the whole business seemed to her, then and now. She'd been more than candid about that with Minister Shacklebolt. She'd _argued_ with Shacklebolt, thinking it better to find the weaknesses behind closed doors, rather than see the petition shot down in court.

"Harry and Ron and Ginny and Luna and Neville didn't swear fealty to me. If anything, _we_ promised to help Harry."

"It's the nearest we could find. The notion of Muggle-born witches and wizards was as yet controversial in those days, so for the purposes of the petition you are merely your parents' heir. Your sworn companions stand in as your parents' courtiers."

She must have looked even more skeptical than she sounded, for he continued, "Yes, I know, it's stretching a point. But the matter had to be hammered about even in the case of the merchant in the 1300s."

"And the Wizengamot is willing to accept this imposture."

"I rather think that times _are_ changing." She looked at him, as if to say, _Come off it, Minister. I don't expect platitudes from you._

To his credit, he recognized that look as well. "Even the Pureblood die-hards are rather reluctant to see another war in our time. And the virtue of binding the Malfoy heir to a Muggle court-wizardship is that it will take him out of the running as Lucius Malfoy's political successor."

She could feel herself frowning again, no matter how she tried to keep a neutral expression on her face. "I'm not sure exactly how. I'd think most would see it as the Malfoys doing their usual changing-of-the-spots."

Kingsley smiled, and this time it looked distinctly carnivorous. "They won't forget the conclusion of the ritual, if the petition is granted."

She shook her head in confusion.

"He will swear a formal oath of fealty to your House."

Now she was confused in earnest. The Minister clarified.

"The House of Granger."

ooo


	33. Chapter 33

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Mary Esmond hadn't been sure what one was supposed to wear to this event.

Addie had chaffed her gently. "Come as yourself, love," she said. "Only dress warmly." She leaned over and kissed Mary on the forehead, and ruffled her sensible short hair. "I'll loan you a cloak if you like."

Addie wasn't on duty, exactly; there were plenty of honor guards for the proceeding, but Kingsley had a different role in mind for her.

A spectator, she said, this time to a ritual of post-war reconciliation.

Mary had been beyond puzzled by that. "But it's some sort of legal proceeding," she said. She stared at the newspaper clipping again. The article stressed that there hadn't been one of its sort for six hundred years, not since the later crusades, everyone was saying. Mary smoothed out the page with those uncanny moving pictures. There were two of them, both with the air of formal or even royal portraits. On the left side, the woman that Mary still named the Black Widow stood with a hand on the shoulder of her son, who held the baby in his arms. On the other side of the column, a couple whom she didn't recognize, but who looked oddly familiar, sat side by side with the ease of the long-married who are fond of each other; he looking at the photographer with a certain quizzical expression, his eyes intermittently obscured by the reflected light on his steel-rimmed spectacles, and she, eyes dark and _unveiled_ (for some reason, Mary thought of the star-bright metal vapor at the end of a welding torch). They were wearing what looked like academic robes, which impression Addie corrected: it was official regalia, the same as their civil servants wore.

The caption identified them as William and Elizabeth Granger, parents to Hermione Granger, Knight of the Order of Merlin, First Class.

It was the first time in living memory that Muggles had appeared on the front page of the _Daily __Prophet_, at least in the role of news-makers.

ooo

She was glad of the advice to dress warmly; the courtroom, a vast amphitheater of stone, radiated chill. Addie whispered some words in Latin, and she felt warmer immediately. A charm, she knew, and shook her head. Anything became ordinary with practice. She pulled the cloak about her, as she and Addie took their seats. Stone benches these, but somehow as she sat, something gave way pleasantly like a cushion.

There was a considerable interval during which the spectators whispered among themselves. Then a silence fell, sweeping over the spectators in the stone amphitheater like a wind over a field of grass. The tribunal filed in, an entire bank of seats filled with dark-robed dignitaries. At the same time, a shorter procession took place in the pit. Kingsley Shacklebolt, in rich and archaic robes, followed by the Granger parents in the same robes as in their newspaper portrait, the Black Widow, her son (carrying the baby). Behind them followed a procession of six figures of various heights, in chain-mail and tabards, their faces hidden behind archaic helmets, walking with the awkwardness that accompanied cumbersome fancy-dress, swords clanking at their sides.

The Grangers took their places in two elaborately carved stone chairs with red velvet cushions, and their entourage of men-at-arms ranged themselves in a semi-circle behind them.

Mary watched the procession in the upper gallery: the first dignitaries to enter appeared to be in their forties or fifties; they filled the higher seats in the gallery. The lower the seats, the closer to the pit of the amphitheater, the older the watchers. Several ranks of red-robed men and women filed in alongside them, unmistakably in the capacity of armed guards.

Last of all, moving very slowly, came a tiny wizened figure in black, with a cloud of white hair and the winter-apple wrinkles of a healthy but very old human being.

When she looked up, Mary recognized her immediately. It was the redoubtable Madam Marchbanks, the friend of Jackie's Aunt Amelia.

As Madam Marchbanks seated herself (unassisted except with her walking stick) Mary felt a shift, and realized that every pair of eyes in the place was looking at Madam Marchbanks: the presiding magistrate.

"This sitting of the Wizengamot will come to order," Madam Marchbanks said, in a voice surprisingly sonorous given her tiny frame and advanced age. _Excellent __sound __quality_, Mary couldn't help thinking. She couldn't see the lavalier of the microphone, but it was clearly one of the best.

"Who petitions this court?"

Much like legal proceedings everywhere, the questions were highly ritualized.

"Kingsley Shacklebolt, Minister for Magic, on behalf of the Muggle petitioners William and Elizabeth Granger and the wizard Draco Abraxas Apollonius Paracelsus Brutus, of the house of Malfoy."

"And the matter of the petition?"

"The Muggle potentates petition this august council for permission to retain the aforesaid wizard as their Court Wizard, with all of the customary privileges and obligations."

"Is the Head of the Family present?"

Shacklebolt inclined his head toward the Black Widow, who stood even taller in her black velvet draperies and her moon-pale fall of hair. (It hung all the way down her back, Mary realized, and would brush the back of her calves if she were in modern dress.) "Narcissa Malfoy, born of the house of Black, speaks for the house of Malfoy." Her voice was clear and ringing, very different from the low conversational murmur Mary had heard in the waiting room at the clinic.

A pause. "And do all parties consent freely to this compact, with no influence of Potions, Charms, Magics Dark or otherwise, and no Influence untoward?"

William and Elizabeth Granger stood, in their black petitioners' robes trimmed with sable. "We do avow that we are freely petitioning this council."

Kingsley Shacklebolt added, "The petitioners have been examined by a Potions Master and three St. Mungo's Senior Healers. The results of the examination are in the hands of the council."

A parchment roll materialized in front of each of the dignitaries in the gallery. Mary blinked; well, they wouldn't be wizards if there weren't some measure of showmanship.

"And do the Heir and the Court of the House of Granger agree to this compact freely?"

The man-at-arms standing directly behind the stone chairs removed his-no, her-helmet, and shook out her curly hair. "I, Hermione Jean Granger, Heir of the House of Granger, do agree to this compact freely."

"How speaks the petitioners' Court?"

In turn, each of the entourage removed his or her helmet. Mary smiled; she had seen these young people in the waiting-room, but they looked rather different in archaic warriors' garb. They stood straight and solemn, helmet in the crook of the left arm and right hand on sword-hilt, and called out their names variously ordinary or odd, which somehow seemed no longer so odd at all. Each in turn "did agree to this compact freely":

_Ronald __Bilius __Weasley_, who stood taller than the rest, his flaming red hair wild around his face; Mary wondered if there had been berserkers in his line, in the old days.

_Ginevra __Molly __Weasley_. Her hair shone bright bronze and spiky, in an athletic cut. There was some smattering of applause as her name was called. "Some Harpies fans here, I see," Addie whispered in Mary's ear.

_Luna __Lovegood._ She was the only one who didn't seem uncomfortable in the heavy archaic garb, for all she was by far the thinnest of them. Which struck Mary funny, because the girl embodied the absent-minded mad-scientist, and now she was looking perfectly at ease as a medieval warrior.

_Harry __James __Potter,_ who interestingly enough, added the title "Heir of the House of Black" to his name. There was a delighted squawk from the galleries; all heads turned to see the little blue-haired toddler waving his arms, in the lap of a brown-haired woman who greatly resembled the Black Widow. "That's the renegade sister," Addie whispered.

_Neville __Longbottom,_ who looked ill-at-ease in the costume, though his heavy frame would seem better suited to it than the rather slighter builds of his comrades. His hand rested on a sword of rather elaborate design, with red stones in the hilt. Addie informed Mary that it was a replica, because of course the original was in the possession of the Goblins by post-war agreement, to be summoned only in case of true and urgent need.

A ritual of this sort apparently didn't qualify.

Everyone remained standing, like soldiers at parade rest. The baby looked about, her bright grey eyes on the spectators. Her brother surreptitiously jiggled her a bit on his hip, to forestall any restlessness, but she seemed occupied, looking from one face to another.

ooo

The ceremony proceeded to additional legal call and response; all of the players seemed well-rehearsed. Even the baby had absorbed some of the solemnity of the players.

She was handed off to her mother at the moment when the chief magistrate said, "You may take the oath."

The Widow's son walked up to the chairs of the petitioners, and straight-backed and graceful as a dancer, sunk to his knees on the stone floor. He held his wand before him in a double-handed grip that was plainly a salute, and then in a clear tenor that filled the room like an operatic aria, he swore on his magic, and that of his ancestors, and that of his children to the seventh generation, that he would faithfully execute his duties as court wizard to the House of Granger.

He did swear fealty to that house, as their faithful vassal.

He held the pose of the swordsman's salute, with his head bowed but back straight and proud, in the oddest combination of attitudes Mary had seen, simultaneously deferential and haughty.

Neville Longbotttom unsheathed the heavy sword with the ruby-handled hilt, and handed it to William Granger, who took the hilt in his right hand with evident effort, and tapped the widow's son on the shoulder. "I do accept your oath, Draco Abraxas Apollonius Paracelsus Brutus, of the house of Malfoy," he said, and then handed the sword across his wife's lap to her right hand, so that she could recite the same formula.

A concession to modern marriage, Addie whispered, though she meant modern marriage on the Muggle side of the border. On their side of the border, "modern" carried a variety of senses.

The ceremony of fealty was immediately succeeded by a second petition, this time on the part of the newly dubbed Court Wizard, that he might place his sister, Hypatia Narcissa Lucia of the house of Malfoy, under the protection of the house of Granger.

The Granger parents recited in unison an oath to protect and sponsor the sister of the Court Wizard as if she were their own kin.

The Black Widow handed the child to her son, and he carefully placed her in the lap of Elizabeth Granger. There was a palpable silence in the room, as if something truly unprecedented had happened. No doubt the whole business had been rehearsed - it had that feel to it - but nonetheless the actual consummation was an astonishment to the audience.

And then the baby broke the spell, by squawking in delight and waving her chubby arms, beaming at her brother and at the assembly. The pause held for another heartbeat, and then the rest of the ceremony was lost in a roar of applause that the remonstrances of Madam Marchbanks took a full five minutes to quell, in spite of the power of her amplified voice.

ooo

In the crush of the reception afterward, Mary could only cling to Addie's arm to avoid being swept away. So it was as a couple that they greeted Kingsley Shacklebolt, who shook hands with Addie and wished her good health, with a warmth that made Mary understand in a flash why they had all agreed on him as their post-war leader.

He smiled at her, as well. "So very good to see you here." Too polite to say that this was also unprecedented, a Muggle-well, more than one of them-being received in the grand foyer of the Ministry for Magic.

The Grangers took turns holding Hypatia as they received the congratulations of the numerous guests. The Widow and her son stood next to them, dispensing nods, bows, and handshakes in an alternation that didn't make sense to Mary; Addie said nothing about it, which led her to believe that it would be a very long story, likely going back centuries. They'd talk it over later, in bed, as they had talked over so very much; Mary and her life with Jackie, Addie's family and her training and the terrifying days of the war.

At Addie's insistence, they joined the receiving line.

Mary shook hands with William and then Elizabeth, and remarked on their daughter's exemplary exertions at the clinic.

They nodded and smiled, in the way of parents who expected no less.

Addie shook hands with the Grangers, correctly but absently. She was paler than usual, nearly as pale as the Widow's son, as she extended her hand to him. To the less than observant eye, he succeeded in suppressing the flinch; he accepted the handshake with a slight bow, a flash of a manner more _Junker_ than English country-house aristocrat. Something stiffened and sharpened in Addie's manner as well: it was the respectful and chastened meeting of two ex-combatants.

The Widow accepted Addie's hand, covering it with both of hers, and inclined her head with weeping-willow grace more appropriate to condolences at a funeral.

Or perhaps that was what they were, very much after the fact.

The etiquette guides that Mary knew had no polite forms for greeting between the murderer's wife and the victim's daughter.

ooo

Addie took charge of her after that, in the manner of a proper host or escort; she made sure that Mary was established in a good vantage point with a nice selection of refreshments: a curiously warming drink that tasted of caramel with an alcoholic tingle, and an assortment of more or less familiar sweet and savory delicacies.

Mary watched as the receiving line crept forward, and marveled at the variety of costumes: there was one of the numerous Weasley brothers, the one with the spectacles, wearing what looked like academic robes open over ordinary button-down shirt and pleated trousers, with a plump rose-gold girl next to him in jeans and red-velveteen top, as if she'd just blown in from dancing at a club. Behind him in line, his mother (in conspicuously archaic robes, dark-red with a border of rampant lions) chatted with a sleek well-upholstered fellow whose curling mustache made him resemble an Alice-in-Wonderland walrus.

She nudged Addie, "Is he a politician?"

Addie started and then laughed. "I suppose you could say so." She indicated Mrs. Weasley. "Molly Prewett's got herself a retroactive invitation to the Slug Club, it would appear." She said, "On the other hand, anyone who took out Bellatrix Lestrange would get the same."

The Grangers' makeshift court greeted Percy, who was grinning in an uncharacteristically unbuttoned way, as his girlfriend leaned close to whisper something in his ear. "Audrey Tonks," Addie said, "she's a Muggle."

"Well, so am I," Mary said.

"Nothing wrong in that, and anyway she's a Tonks." She whispered, "I heard a rumor that the Black Widow meant to acquire her as a daughter-in-law. Too late for that, unless she wants to go toe to toe with Molly."

The walrus-mustached fellow was shaking hands with the Grangers now, and from the look of it, saying something complimentary about their daughter, for they looked in her direction and nodded. He moved a step or two further on, and greeted the Widow, who smiled at him with a vivacity almost girlish. "Slughorn's pleased with her, it would seem," Addie said.

Slughorn shook hands with the Widow's son, rather effusively it would seem, "my dear boy," she heard over the sea-rush of conversation.

"Well, that's a turn-up for the books," said the old woman next to them with the spectacularly outdated hat, on which a stuffed vulture crouched as if scouting the crowd for likely livers to peck. "Never thought I'd see Horace making peace with the Malfoys." A crocodilian smile, "On the other hand, the Malfoys aren't what they were. And that's all to the good."

She turned to Addie, "Good to see you, lass." Addie nodded with wide eyes and an expression that recalled a common soldier greeted by a general.

The red-headed Weasley matriarch was talking to the Widow's son now.

He nodded, "Yes, by all means, Madam Weasley." She leaned in to talk to the baby perched on his opposite hip.

"What a sweet little thing she is."

The vulture bobbed alarmingly. "A good thing I didn't wager on _that_," said the old woman, but she was smiling.

ooo

**Author****'****s ****Note:** Thank you for your patience for the delay in posting. The last months have seen extensive demands on my time both from my day job and from my original-fiction career. That doesn't mean that I'll be abandoning fanfiction.

We are now entering the endgame of this novel-length tale that began as a discarded snippet from _Amends_. I'm projecting another three to four chapters.


	34. Chapter 34

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

It's only the soreness of his feet that tells Draco that the reception at the Ministry has been hours, and not minutes. His brain has been occupied with an constant replay, with variations, of everything that could have gone wrong. He vaguely remembers the time before the war when he actually would think things like "What could go wrong?" Now he has altogether too many answers to that question.

And now it's over. Andromeda Tonks is telling him that he did well, very well, and the Minister has shaken his hand as well. Granger is looking well pleased, if tired. She's absently pulling on a lock of hair that has become entangled in the mesh of the chain-mail.

He must say that's the first outfit he's seen her wearing that comes anywhere near truth in advertising. Had she stomped onto the Hogwarts Express wearing that, he might have had some idea of who—or what—had just entered the wizarding world.

Lovegood is saying something about a Portkey, and Weasley chimes in, "I'm looking forward to putting on my own clothes. These Muggle things are _heavy_."

Potter—somewhere in his peripheral vision, and things have changed, because he's not uneasy with that—is taking charge of Teddy, who has started crying, in the way of an overstimulated small child who wants his bed.

Draco can't say he faults Teddy for that. He's feeling more than a bit over-stimulated himself. But the day's not over, because Weasley the youngest is saying, "Mum's insisting."

"Well, then," Potter says, "there's no getting out of it."

"At least then let's get changed first," Granger says, and the Minister nods.

Potter hands off Teddy to Andromeda, and the six of them leave, led by one of Shacklebolt's aides.

His mother is holding Hypatia, who is fussing. He'd like to go home, but it's not going to be possible. She knows it too.

Andromeda says, "Go on. She'll do without you for a few minutes."

It takes him less time than that to exchange the petitioner's robes for his ordinary clothes, the Muggle clothes that have regrettably become part of his wardrobe, because he spends so much of his time in the other world. And now that he has a court wizard's appointment, that's likely to continue to be the case.

His mother is wearing everyday robes when he returns, and she's talking with Andromeda. Weasley the youngest—Ginevra—has the Portkey.

"Mum's gone on ahead. She's expecting us," she says.

This is the part of the journey he's dreading, now that he's finished replaying disaster.

No, he corrects himself, not disaster, only the potential for extraordinary awkwardness.

ooo

The Burrow is indeed a ramshackle country wizard's house of the old style. Some of the patchy bits are plainly new. It probably sustained some damage in the war, given who lived there. He'd read the whole bit in the _Prophet_ about the lot of them going into hiding.

They materialize on a hilltop and walk in, so he has the prospect and the long view as they tramp through the wintry fields. The clouds overhead hang in a grey furry blanket, and the air is cold with the steely smell of coming snow. The blue twilight gives an even more pronounced golden cast to the many windows shining indoor light. Even wrapped in a warming charm, he can feel the invitation of that interior… however shabby it might be.

Quite in contrast to his childhood gibes to Ron Weasley, it's neither dirty nor threadbare; there's a motley richness of color and texture.

It's awkward. He knew it was going to be awkward, and still it doesn't equal the experience. He's grateful for Hypatia's warm weight in his arms, and he feels cowardly that he's using his little sister as a shield against the world. People see her, and by reflex look kindly on the one carrying her.

The kitchen and the dining area… well, there is no formal dining room in the Weasley house. There is only a sprawling kitchen table that expands, magically and smoothly, to take up the influx of visitors.

_Slickly, done_, he thinks. He has been studying up on household charms, and that's not apprentice-work. It looks effortless, which is a sure sign of long practice.

He's reassured by Elizabeth Granger on his right and William on his left. She's the real Power. She's chatting easily with their hosts. Yes, of course, she already knows them; both Grangers already know them.

He remembers that confrontation in front of Flourish and Blott's … how long ago. Surely they remember.

Not that any of it matters now. He's a part of their family, a vassal of their House. Hypatia wriggles in his arms and squawks in delight. Across the room, there's a little blond baby who might be her twin… well, isn't, because she's a bit smaller, and rounder…

… and the tuft of hair on her head, less thick than Hypatia's corona of fine, flyaway hair, leans a bit more to the red-gold than the moonlight-pale of his own, and hers.

She reaches out her arms to the newcomer. "Baby!" she says with conviction.

It's her new word.

The other child, looking over her father's shoulder, says something like "Gah-gah-gah!"

"Baby!" Hypatia says. She's quite pleased with herself. Not only is there Teddy (Draco translates) but there are others. Hypatia approves of the Weasley domain, because it is full of people inclined to fuss over her, and there are peers to be greeted.

Making connections, he thinks. His sister is a Malfoy to the core.

On the new model, he thinks, and then blanches as the child's father runs to smile at him—

The face is scarred, seamed all over with silvery scars that would look ancient except for the red flare that surrounds them, as if the system were in a perpetual state of irritation. The bone structure under it tells him that the man must have been strikingly handsome, before…

… before a werewolf's claws tore his face open. He's lucky that he lost neither eye…

The smile is frightening, and Draco has to back-translate it through the ruined features to realize that it's sincere. Would be a real smile on a face that wasn't seamed with old scar tissue that turns it into a sort of demonic smirk.

Bill Weasley. And the baby must be the infant born a few months after Hypatia. He remembers them now, his mother and the gorgeous Fleur Delacour, the day that Fleur shared her generous portion of take-away with them.

Bill says, "Victoire seems to be interested in making the acquaintance of her cousin." He smiles. "Hypatia, isn't it? After the alchemist." Draco nods. His mouth is dry. There's something he ought to say, that hasn't been said, that he should have said months ago, if not years.

That ruined face is his fault.

Bill looks at him, his expression serious. "I think that you've done admirably as a father," he says. Draco gulps; he hadn't any idea the conversation would take this turn. "It's no calling for the faint of heart," Bill continues. "There's the real things, and then there's the ones that visit you at four o'clock in the morning." He finds them a place at the table. "Here, sit down." He takes a seat at the long padded bench that Molly Weasley has conjured. It's upholstered in something soft and no doubt it's reinforced with a cushioning charm.

Yes, definitely a cushioning charm, he concludes, as Bill budges over to make room for him.

"Four o'clock in the morning is the worst," Draco says. "There's no one awake but you and the baby. Or you and your imagination."

Bill nods. Molly has reached their end of the table, and she's beaming. Two crystal goblets float down and settle gently in front of them. A faceted decanter hovers gracefully above one, then the other, and the scent is unmistakable.

"Elf-made wine," Bill says. "Fleur's parents sent it."

Molly says, "Now don't think of refusing. It's only a glass." She flicks her wand, and the table rearranges itself, with only the slightest tremor in the surface of the wine. "We'll be drinking the toast shortly."

His puzzlement must show.

"To the court wizard of the House of Granger," she says.

ooo

Hypatia reaches for the goblet, or for the play of candlelight in its faceted depths. Draco reflexively intercepts her chubby fingers, and shifts her in his arms so that she's facing her cousin. Hypatia gives him a speaking look, then turns her attention to Victoire.

Draco stares at the goblet for a moment, his fingers closing over the stem, and breathes in the shifting bouquet of the wine. The conversations rise and fall around him. Bill Weasley's expression is neutral; yes, he's supped with horrors, and knows more than he'd like about reading intent.

"I'm sorry." There, it's out.

Bill raises an eyebrow.

"The raid… what happened. Greyback. I didn't know they were bringing him." He raises his eyes to meet Bill's. "But I'm the one who made it possible."

The long considering silence would drive him mad, except that he's already lived through more of those to do for a lifetime, beginning with the deliberations of the Wizengamot at the war crimes trial.

Bill looks off into the middle distance, and then shifts little Victoire on his shoulder.

Draco looks down to see Bill's hand extended to him… the palm as fair as his own, the back tan and rough, but unscarred.

He accepts the handshake. It's firm, and strong, and the fingers are long and graceful—not too different from his father's hands, but put to rather different use: a warrior who began as a fine worker in defensive magic, a Gringotts curse-breaker, and (it's rumored) the _de facto_ liaison with the Goblins in the post-war.

And then in the pause, he hears Madam Granger (in the next room) say in a low voice, "I could see how you might have been tempted."

"More a matter that he'd disappeared, and we had other fish to fry. I don't know how many times I lay awake thinking about it, after what happened to Bill." Molly Weasley, in another key entirely. "Though to be fair it was more the fault of Bellatrix."

"A piece of work." The dryness of Madam Granger's tone would freeze the blood.

"Oh she was. Good riddance, I say. She'd done for enough of us by the end."

He looks at Bill, who looks back. He'd heard it too…

"We came through it," Bill says. "I was at the trial." He shifts Victoire, who smiles at Hypatia. "You chose very little of it freely, and on the one occasion you could choose, you didn't choose wrong. At the Manor."

He hadn't framed it that way at the time, only that the words of denunciation hadn't even occurred to him. One would have thought they'd have come quite naturally, the number of times he'd wished ill on Potter and Granger and Weasley.

He still remembers the dryness of his mouth, and the way his throat hurt when he tried to swallow, and his mother taking it over—Granger being the only one she could identify.

Granger. Hermione. His present foster-sister.

His mother had been protecting him.

And Bill Weasley's mother would have hunted him down if she hadn't been occupied with more pressing matters. As it was, there was a certain fittingness to her being the one to kill Bellatrix…

… who hasn't haunted his dreams in a while, yes, now that he thinks about it.

It seems that his protection in the post-war extends even to his sleeping hours. Hypatia is safe, that's the main thing, even if the road to safety winds through the alien landscape of the Muggle world.

"She _was_ a piece of work," Bill says.

Draco nods. At least he's not having this conversation with Neville.

A procession of dishes floats out of the kitchen, settling on the table. Simple enough fare, but splendidly done: and yes, he'll have to ask how she manages that, the main dish and the side dishes all finishing at once, and settling onto the table. Hermione had hinted that might be some part of his duties, on days that her parents worked long days at their practice.

Well, that could be seen to later.

ooo

He blames Arthur Weasley for the Firewhiskey, and himself for thinking it was a good idea. A toast to the winter season, in advance of Yuletide, with an invitation to the extended family to visit on the Christmas holidays …

… Which invitation his mother accepted on their behalf, and then sidelong, he heard Neville whisper something to Hermione; he caught only the word "mistletoe" and that was enough, well, that and Hermione's laugh and blush. Really, _that_ was the reason he drank so deeply in that first toast, and then accepted a second tumblerful—

That he drank it, of course, was only his own fault. At some point, someone—it may have been Andromeda—mustered all the small children to their own corner of the front room, where they could crawl about and gabble at each other, surrounded by a casual ring of adults.

It _had_ been Andromeda who said to him, "She'll be fine. Now enjoy yourself."

He reflected that he'd been altogether too obedient in that case.

He remembers Arthur and Molly looking at each other, middle-aged faces aglow in the candlelight, incandescent as young lovers—that look he knew from his own parents, that he'd only seen in flashes.

No, he would not envy Ron Weasley, not even retroactively.

He had in fact humored Ron, and even consented to a game of chess, with the full expectation of a humiliating loss… well, the firewhiskey decidedly did not help. One shouldn't drink and play chess, well unless one were Ron Weasley.

Who said something good-natured and chaffing about how Draco didn't have to go easy now that they were cousins…

… And he didn't mind so much, even when Ron said that Pansy gave him a much better run.

"She handed you your head," Draco said (yes, remembered saying).

And weirdly enough Ron smiled, and said, "Muggle tactics. Dirty Muggle tactics. Except when we play Muggle-style, and then I win."

After a bit, he retired to the edge of the room to sit in the golden lamplight with the firewhiskey tumbler in his hand, and to consider the room from the philosophical perspective—almost aerial—of wise drunkenness. He liked that distance. He could watch Neville and Hermione hold hands, and remember with detachment that he'd always found Hermione annoying—though his father's reproaches about not excelling her certainly didn't help the case—and it was all right, it was quite all right that she and Neville were a couple, quite all right, and quite all right too that Ron was holding hands with Lavender Brown, and at one point feeding her dainties … and then Fleur and Bill, watching Victoire, hovering and solicitous without descending.

No, none of that bothered him, none of those couples … except he was alone.

He didn't remember how the tumbler had refreshed itself—well, at that point he might have taken the invitation as general, and summoned the decanter himself …

He wouldn't see his parents together that way for years yet to come. He wasn't and wouldn't be permitted at visiting hours in Azkaban, not so long as the Dark Mark persisted on his forearm, which looked to be forever.

Twenty years.

And he didn't even know who the man was, never had, and knew even less, remembering all unwilling the testimony at the trial.

What he does remember, the next morning with the headache and then all the clearer after the sobriety draught had taken it away, was weeping like an abandoned child, in the cold air on the back steps facing the garden, and letting Hermione haul him to his feet and take a turn around the garden.

He's grateful, he supposes, that she force-fed him neither sobriety potion nor sensible advice, but let him stumble along, guided by her steady arm … as he rambled, oh yes, he definitely remembers passing the chicken houses, and the vegetable patch under its straw and snow, and oh my gods, what _had_ he said?

Drunk, he'd been drunk.

_In vino veritas,_ and in firewhiskey, well, _veritas_ with no editing whatsoever.

Granger had said something, hadn't she? "Raw feed from the subconscious," oh what had he said, that he felt such crushing shame this morning?

That he was going to be alone forever.

That his father … his father would have disapproved of his appointment as court-wizard, well, beyond disapproved—

And that he didn't care, except he did care, painfully, because his father was locked away for twenty years and it was going to be a very different world when he emerged from the mists of the North Sea to take up…

… the authority that his mother would never permit him or anyone else so long as she lived. Because he knew, he'd overheard, oh gods he wished he hadn't overheard, during the period of their cramped house-arrest at the Manor. No, not the lovemaking, though that had been disconcerting enough, but the reproaches.

His own mother, regal and cold (he could tell the posture from the tone of voice) saying that however much Lucius loved her, and however much he reproached himself over what had happened, never again would she permit anyone to set the course for herself and her son.

And he could accede to that, as her husband, or refuse it—and cease to be her husband.

It might have been a cough or a sob—he couldn't tell, because he'd never heard his father weep—that preceded the low solemn words, "Then I accede."

Abdicate, he had meant.

His mother was regent, and would remain so.

And he had no idea who his father was. Did he want to be that man? All his life he'd assumed that's who he would become, but now …

He remembers stumbling in the snow, and his feet cold and wet, and then suddenly warming — it must have been a warming and a drying charm she cast — and the stars overhead, so unutterably high above that you could look up into that immensity and imagine yourself falling forever into it—

The tears froze on his face, and she turned him by the shoulders and warmed and dried that too, and talked sensibly to him (not a word of it can he remember this morning, even after the sobriety potion).

"You're not ready to hear it, are you?" she said at the end.

No, he supposes not, given he can't remember it.

He told her too much. He told her everything. He feels hollow, as if he'd vomited his soul onto somebody's shoes.

Brother and sister. Are brothers and sisters like this? Do they talk sense to each other?

He'd asked that question, hadn't he? The next bit, yes, that was Harry saying "Exhibit A, Ron and Ginny."

And Ginny saying, "I told Ron he wouldn't know about kissing or anything like, so he could sod off …"

Much too much information. He raises a hand to his eyes, as if to ward off the onslaught of it … about twelve hours too late, he'd estimate.

It was Ron who'd said, "No more for this one," and taken the tumbler out of his by-then-unresisting hand.

And he'd got home, somehow … oh, likely his mother had something to do with that.

ooo

**Author's Note:** Thank you for your patience while my fan-fiction work was on hiatus. We will be returning to regular updates.


	35. Chapter 35

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Draco is sitting in Mr. Weasley's deep armchair, a tumbler cradled in his hands and a distant, abstracted, weary smile on his face, as he watches the children tumble together in the corner that Andromeda has partitioned off for their use. For all that he emphatically does not resemble Arthur Weasley otherwise, Hermione thinks, there's something reminiscent of him in that smile.

Ginny has put aside her drink to demonstrate (as far as she could while not airborne) the maneuver she did to avoid crashing into her own Keeper at the last Harpies game. Hermione would take a moment to nod toward Draco, but she doesn't want to interrupt the anecdote.

"Upside down, and backward," she says. "And the crowd went wild, thinking I'd done it on purpose."

Harry laughs. "A shame you didn't have Luna doing the commentary. That would have been funny."

Luna says, "I'm fond of Quidditch, but it's such an _odd_ game." She takes out her wand to draw pictures in the air for the amusement of the children: centaurs and Thestrals, molecular models with vibrating bonds, teacups and saucers (_flying saucers,_ yes, no doubt she means that too), and flying dragons that do the occasional aerial back-flip.

"Yes, that's the very maneuver," Ginny says, gesturing to Luna's flying cartoon dragons.

The children laugh; Teddy grabs for the floating illusions, and the younger two wave their arms and point. Hypatia has figured out how to get up on her knees and lunge, but her fingers fall short of the creatures and she tumbles onto her face.

She looks up, laughs, and has another go at the creatures. Tough little thing, Hermione thinks. Draco has restrained himself, apparently, and not come to pick her up.

Hermione glances toward him just in case. The armchair is empty.

She has been meaning to have a word with Draco, if nothing else to congratulate him on his aplomb during the ceremony… no, his grace, especially that moment of genuflection to receive the ritual tap with the sword.

"Anyone want more to drink?" she asks, by way of alibi for roaming afield.

They shake their heads, and Harry covers his tumbler. "No, I have to study tonight."

She raises an eyebrow.

"They'll be holding the NEWTs again within the year," he says. "Shacklebolt's sending a notice to the Defense Association veterans."

Harry studying without being prompted—well, things have changed, rather. And she herself is juggling three offers, two of them pending the NEWTs, yes, has been keeping them delicately in balance as things are sorting themselves out in the post-war. It will be time to choose, very soon now.

Outside the kitchen windows, the garden shows dark. He's not in the kitchen. She casts _Nox_ to sink the room in darkness; as her eyes adjust to the night, she sees the stars… and on the back steps, a familiar figure hunched in a posture altogether familiar, only this time without his baby sister, who's enjoying the company of her contemporaries in the front room.

She casts a warming charm and opens the door a crack, and hears muffled sobs.

Her first instinct is to close the door and pretend she never saw or heard. It's raw and a bit indecent, intruding on that…

Three years ago, Harry stumbled on a similar scene and got an attempted _Crucio _for his trouble—well, and Draco came within inches of being sliced to ribbons.

Three years ago. Before the war. It is the post-war. It is the post-war now.

And this is her foster-brother, and things are rather different. If he takes it as interference, she'll step back, but she has duties. That ceremony wasn't mere fancy-dress; the oath of fealty binds her as well, for he's under her family's protection.

Resolutely she opens the door and steps into the December evening. She clears her throat, and lets the door close behind her sufficiently loudly to let him know that someone has joined him.

He looks up briefly, to take another sip from the tumbler in his hand.

"Are you quite all right?" she asks.

"Quite. They're better off without me."

Oh dear. He's reached the maudlin or else the self-reproachful stage of drunkenness. "No use," he says. "None whatsoever. Nobody loves me."

"Your mother does," Hermione says, "and Hypatia, and …" She can't characterize her own feeling toward him as _love._

"She doesn't know any better," Draco snaps, swiftly enough on the heels of her declaration to hide her temporizing. "And anyway I didn't mean family." He wipes his nose on his handkerchief, pockets it once more (Pureblood manners apparently being proof against advanced inebriation) and continues, "Those girls look, but they're not interested in _me_. It's 'oh, what a sweet baby,' and anyway they're Muggles and they don't know any better. And I can't marry a Pureblood, because Mother says it's out of the question now. And none of the Half-bloods will look at me, let alone…" He swallows the next bit, she'd guess, because his drunken brain is dithering over the correct term, and he has decided for the better part of valor.

"You have years ahead of you to find someone."

"But everyone else already has someone. I'll never find anyone. I'll be alone forever." He puts the tumbler down with exaggerated care, folds his arms over his knees, and puts his head down to cry again.

She sits down next to him, and awkwardly pats his shoulder, left-handed. Her right hand has gone to her wand-grip, just in case. No, _Crucio_ doesn't appear to be in the offing, and a good thing too, but she is taking no chances.

"I'm _nobody,_" he says. "I used to be somebody. My father, y'know." He takes a long shuddering gasp for breath. "And now I'm nobody, because my father was… was … "

For a moment, she thinks he's going to be sick, but he merely shudders and hugs himself. He's shivering from the cold. She casts a warming charm on him—he's far gone indeed, if he hadn't thought to do that, and with the alcohol in his system, he's far more likely to fall victim to hypothermia.

"You are not your father."

"No," he says, rocking back and forth, as if trying to soothe something into sleep. Arms empty, that usually hold…

… a baby. What she'd never have guessed of him when he was at school. No, she never would have guessed that horrid little boy for an affectionate father in the making.

"You know, they don't let me see him. Mother goes to visiting hours alone." He stares off into the distance, eyes blank and unseeing, then unbidden yanks his left sleeve up.

She hears the cloth tear.

"That's never going to fade. They'll find it on my bones when I'm dead." He says, "I was so proud of it, you know, when I got it." He picks up the tumbler and knocks back the contents before she can stop him, never mind he's quite drunk enough. "Bellatrix _fucking_ Lestrange."

She drags him to his feet. "No more."

He grabs the tumbler, empty as it is, and follows her, unresisting.

Four steps into the garden, he stumbles and sprawls face-down in the snow (the glass still clutched in his left hand). This time she doesn't bother with main force; she flicks her wand to lift him carefully, straightening him like a crumpled puppet.

After setting him on his feet, she warms and dries him, with a touch of _Scourgify_ for good measure.

"Azkaban does fucking weird things to your sex drive," he says. "She wasn't sleeping with him any more, if she ever did."

The conversation is rapidly traveling into the territory of things she never wanted to know, but at the same time, it doesn't seem advisable (or even possible) to interrupt him. At some point she is going to have to take that tumbler, and make sure that nobody lets him drink any more.

He leans on her arm, and his fingers close on her forearm. No, nowhere near as heavy as she would have guessed, except when he stumbles and flops like dead weight.

"She was in love with that dead thing. He was dead, you know, just hadn't realized it. Bloody necromancy." A hiccup, or maybe it was a cough. "Of course it isn't permitted. Universally banned. Krum told me they only taught the theory at Durmstrang." A loose unhumorous laugh. "After he told me he'd de-ball me if I ever said anything about Grindelwald again." He clarifies, "Pushed me up against a wall and told me there were much, much worse things than dying, and if I had even a tenth the sense he expected from a Malfoy, I'd know what sort of thing my father was serving. And that was _before_ the Dark Lord returned." He stops, hands on knees, doubled over as if he is going to be sick; Hermione readies herself to Vanish the mess.

He retches experimentally, then straightens up again. Hermione lets him find his balance again, and offers her arm. They continue their weird meandering promenade. Overhead, the snow-clouds have cleared, and the sharp winter constellations show, Orion with his hunting dog. Connect-the-dots, a human mnemonic; she knows that overhead reaches a shallow ocean of atmosphere (whose convection makes the starlight twinkle and waver) and above that, the hardest of hard vacuum.

"A dead thing," he mumbles. "Fucking walking around and raving and killing things. Right in the bloody fucking drawing room. I can't stand that bloody room." He stops, and leans on her. The tendons of his hand stand out stark in the dim light with the tension of his grip, his arm linked through hers in a parody of chivalry…

… only she knows who is the knight.

"Except he's dead. He's dead now, thank god, thank gods, thank fucking Merlin and Harry sodding Potter." Draco's language has gone straight to the gutter after his (how many?) tumblers of firewhiskey. "I watched them shovel him into the pit, thank god, so I know he's dead and he's not coming back. Fucking necromancy. My father showed me the rite, you know. His father wouldn't let him read those books until he was twenty-seven. It's in our library, of course. Finest collection of grimoires outside of Hogwarts and the Department of Mysteries.

"_Secrets of the Darkest Art_. You've read that one." A horrid loose-lipped laugh, high-pitched and braying. "If you knew about Horcruxes, which plainly you did." That barking laugh again (maybe _barking_ in earnest, she thought), and then, "And the _Codex Maleficarum_. Read the whole fucking Restricted Section, didn't you, Granger? And then Dumbledore turned the whole lot over to you."

She stares up at the stars that don't care, that will still be there when she and Harry and Ron are long-dead absences and the war too far in the past even to be a memory. "He was out of the picture, and I made use of the window of opportunity."

"Albus fucking Dumbledore. Not such a mad old bat as they said. 'You're not a killer, Draco.' Much good it did me. Bellatrix never let me forget it. Every day, 'You're not a killer, Draco, you're a shame on the House of Black.'" The impression of Bellatrix is exact enough to raise the hairs on the back of her neck. Their voices are in much the same vocal range, and Draco's impression resurrects that horrifying seductive whisper …

He is taking long steps now, having remembered his legs. He'd make a fairish long-distance walker, with that long loping stride, even if it's beneath his dignity as a Pureblood wizard.

"She was like a fucking Dementor herself. Never wore the mask after Azkaban. Her face was the calling card." He whispers, "When she kissed me I thought, oh gods, this is what it's like to be Kissed. She laughed, and told me I was a dead failure at Occlumency, and she'd have another go at me to see if I could get it."

They've reached the edge of the property now, where the hedgerow separates the garden from the road to Ottery St. Catchpole. It towers above them, its burden of snow glowing in the starlight.

"Funny, it was only that Muggle doctor who helped, at all. Slagged down to bedrock, I was. She never laid a hand on me other than that, but she was in my head every moment. When I least expected…"

That pale set face stares at something invisible and horrifying, that floats before him and hides the hedgerow and then the vegetable patch.

Then in a calm, reasonable voice, "Dr. Burgess said, 'There is a core. We will build up from there. You have survived, and that's the prerequisite. Tearing down is easy. Building up is hard.'"

Then his voice breaks, and the tears run down his face.

She stops, turns him by the shoulders, casts another warming charm and dries his tears.

"I don't ever want Hypatia to live through that."

It isn't so cold that their footsteps crunch or squeak on the snow. She hears his breathing, short and harsh. "I bet you don't know who I hate the most in all this."

She wouldn't presume to guess.

"It isn't you."

"I didn't imagine it was," she says. "We scarcely know each other, even now."

He narrows his eyes. "Severus Snape. He sold me out." He shook himself. "Bloody hero, but he couldn't be arsed to tell me what the fuck was going on. Had at me like bloody Bellatrix, and I fought him off. I'd learned that much." That defiant chin-tilt didn't belong to present-tense Draco, but the boy of sixteen. "Double dealing son-of-a-Muggle, halfblood fucking bastard."

Draco drunk could give Ron a run for his money. Only a vampire could be fonder of sanguinary epithets.

"What would you have done if he'd told you the truth?"

"He wouldn't have told me. I was nobody, everybody's little pawn. I am not a fucking moron, Granger. There was the Dark Lord and all that. I wasn't _sleeping_ at the bloody trial." He said, "It's obvious. Burgess had to point it out too: I'm angriest at the one who tried to protect me. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't dig him up and fucking _Reducto_ his half-Muggle arse."

He stares straight ahead, and lurches forward as if taking on the next leg of a death-march. "Black marble tomb and all. You bloody Gryffs hated him when he was alive, and now he's everybody's favorite dark hero. Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy. Or Potions Master. Or the Dark Lord's favorite man on the inside, which he was. And wasn't."

Snape's mortal remains reside now under an unmarked black marble slab at Hogwarts, the gleaming shadow of Dumbledore's white tomb.

"And they all go on about how he protected me. Except he didn't. Bellatrix … and the Dark Lord … both of them …"

No need to specify the verb. After the trials, the whole world knows it.

"And I'm nobody. My father's double, but he's in Azkaban. Very much more convenient to snub _me,_ because I'm Lucius Malfoy to the life, and not in a position to _Crucio_ them for their impertinence.

"My father made this mess for us." The grimace shows teeth, sharp and white in the snowlight. "Pureblood this and Pureblood that, and his fucking Lord is a fucking Half-blood, and he didn't even have the wit to know the difference."

"You aren't your father."

"Fucking obviously not, Granger."

She disengages her arm and steps back, wand in hand. "And I am not your punching bag, Draco-with-too-many-middle-names Malfoy. So let's get the language back in line, or not talk at all." She adds, "Unless you call it talk, when you're giving me a raw feed from your subconscious."

He recoils as if she'd hit him.

She says, "You wouldn't talk to Hypatia like that."

"She's a baby. I don't want her to know anything about this."

"She's your sister."

"No." He said, "She's my _daughter._ And she doesn't need to know what he was. He was just as careless, fathering her. He didn't think, any more than I did. I can't make it up to Pansy … but Hypatia is alive, and she's going to live to a hundred and fifty, if I have anything to say about it." Against the snow-lit garden, his profile shows sharp-cut as the prow of a dragon-ship, never so much like his father as when disowning him. "He'd have killed her for being a Squib."

"You're probably not ready to hear this…"

He nods, but pauses as if to say, _yes, but tell me anyway_.

"You're under no obligation to your father. Even if I believed the feudal nonsense your lot go in for, I'd think the debt discharged by what he put you through. You can go your own way. You can marry whomever you like." He shakes his head, as if harried by flies. "All right, if freedom gives you agoraphobia, then think this: you're under the protection of the House of Granger. We are a Muggle-born dynasty—" she tries not to burst into laughter at the notion of her sensible middle-class parents as _dynasts_—"and you can marry a Muggle, if that's who catches your fancy. You can change your name, dye your hair green, emigrate to America, take up sky-diving, go on the stage like Zabini…"

"Zabini's a prat."

"Be that as it may, he's a decent actor."

"How would you know?"

"I heard him rehearsing bits from Shakespeare. He wants to play Hamlet."

"He'd have his choice of skulls to soliloquize over," Draco says. The smirk twists into a sour expression, as if he's trying to spit out something bitter. "For that matter, so would I."

"Do you want to go inside?"

He nods. By now, they've made a complete circuit of the rather extensive back garden of the Burrow.

"So is this how it is with brothers and sisters?"

"I think you'd best ask someone else. I can't say I have experience." The door to the kitchen opens, and Ginny peers out.

"So that's where you've gotten to."

"Oh no, Hypatia!" Draco says.

"She's quite all right. Andromeda fixed her up a cot, and she's sleeping." She turns to Hermione. "Is he still dead drunk?"

"In vino veritas," Hermione said, "and in Firewhiskey…"

"I know where mum keeps the Sobriety Potion."

Draco shakes his head violently, then sways a bit as if he's made himself dizzy.

He trips twice coming up the back steps. Ginny and Hermione maneuver him into the kitchen, and thence to the front room, full circle to Mr. Weasley's deep armchair.

Ron takes the tumbler out of Draco's hand. "Looks like enough for this one."

"So, Weasley, does your sister talk sense to you?" Draco asks, peering at Ron in a way that would be comical if it were anyone else.

"All the time," Ginny says. "He wasn't going to let me date Harry, or anybody else for that matter, and I told him he had little experience and less sense, given…" she bites off her own words as she briefly makes eye contact with Lavender, and looks away again, "so he could sod off with his protective-elder-brother pose…"

Ron says, "And I'm the one told her to try out for the Harpies and let the NEWTs go hang. So give me credit…"

"For not being a _complete _git."

"I don't have a sister," Neville says, "but Ginny told me that I _wasn't_ 'nobody in particular.'"

"And hexed the snot out of anybody who'd say otherwise," Ginny says, with a predatory smirk, and a significant look at Draco, who puts both hands protectively over his nose. "Bygones being bygones, Malfoy, as long as you behave yourself, you'll have my sisterly wisdom too."

His face shows chalk-white under the mellow lamplight. "In spite of my father."

"Your father can sod off. And I'd think Azkaban far enough."

"I'm sorry. What happened to you…" Ginny's face closes and hardens, which plays up the resemblance between her and Draco. Hermione wonders how many ancestors they share, for that kinship to show at the bone.

"It happened to me," he says. "But I wasn't eleven at the time. Not that it should happen … to anybody. At any age."

He doubles over, and sobs inconsolably.

Ginny and Ron stare at each other, then at Draco. Neville pats Draco on the back, somewhat awkwardly, and the other two follow suit.

"It's not his fault his father's a nasty piece of work," Ginny says.

Ron says, "Noblesse oblige." Unspoken, because it would have been provocation, _not everybody's lucky enough to be born a Weasley. _

Harry, sitting at the edge of things and looking distinctly uncomfortable, nods.

Luna drifts in from the kitchen, taps Draco on the shoulder, and says, "Tea?"

He looks up, wipes his eyes, and takes the proffered cup and saucer. Hermione is fairly certain that Luna has dosed it with a dollop of Sobriety Potion, because his eyes seem a bit more in focus, and his movements more coordinated, after downing it.

"For the record," he says in a cold level voice, "my father is dead to me."


	36. Chapter 36

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Mary Esmond found that the atmosphere in the waiting room had shifted decisively the next day.

The Black Widow was greeted cordially by some number of the other patients, who previously had sat at the other end of the room and ignored her. The father of the Red-Headed League spoke to her with a smile, and his wife nodded to her cordially, and when the Widow's son entered, his usual cronies were chaffing him about his new job. Apparently, it was novelty enough for him to be working, let alone working for … Muggles.

He was good-humored enough about it, and said something to Blaise, that Granger had expressed admiration of his acting.

Blaise's expression changed then. "Oh did she?"

All irony gone, well, his heart naked on his face.

Little Hypatia was even more talkative than before, for something in the atmosphere no longer constrained her, or she had reached the stage where her language development was taking off on its exponential curve. She gabbled at the other children, the little blond baby sitting on her silver-glowing mother's lap, and the little boy with the changeable hair.

_Cousins,_ Addie told her confidentially, though she already knew that. Everyone in that whole world beyond the wall was cousin to everyone else.

The winter solstice was drawing nearer. The afternoon gave them a lacy-flaked, truly Dickensian snow. It was falling thick and fast when she left work, tickling her face with its cold and feathery touch. The thick snowflakes made woolly shadows in the lamplight as she and Addie walked to the cafe down the street, as if they had stepped into a hushed and magical world.

"So what are you doing for the holiday?" Addie asked. "For Yule or for Christmas." Both, apparently were celebrated in their world, though both with a sort of jolly indifference to metaphysics. Three hundred years later, some were chary yet of the Church holidays, because what had happened at the time of the burning.

Mary considered. "Well." She didn't know yet, because what had been her life before: waiting, inevitably, for Jackie to come home from rehearsal, for she had performed two years in a row in shows that ran the length of the holidays. A jolly night at the theater, for the holiday-makers. The cast parties were brilliant, the players ebullient with quips and cranks. She'd always liked Jackie's colleagues, but these last years there had been no invitations, for those social constellations broke up and re-formed with each production, and she'd never really belonged to those circles except as Jackie's spouse.

And then there had been the two years after, the years of widowhood, when she had spent the holidays at home with a nice glass of wine and a good book…

Jackie's sensible helpmeet always had been domestic after her fashion.

Though she did go in for the dashing types, didn't she? First an actor and now a warrior or policewoman, she wasn't sure exactly which, on leave for reasons of health, well, under mandated treatment for her war-related illness.

She considered the question. "I've never really done much for the holidays," she said. "Jackie was usually working."

Addie considered that. "Did you enjoy the visit, then?" Mary frowned. "To our world. The ceremony."

"It was quite interesting." Very like foreign travel, or maybe time travel, in one's own neighborhood.

"It's quite splendid this time of year," Addie said. "We could take the train…" She said. "Are you taking the holidays?"

"I might, then. A day or so."

"But you could take more."

She nodded. There were others, of course, and she had seniority.

"Well, then, do. I'd like to go on holiday myself. There's one of our villages in Scotland…"

"One of yours?"

"All witches and wizards. It's nothing like anything you've ever seen."

"No, I don't imagine it is." She smiled. "Well, it's a new year, or shortly to be. Why not?"

She felt an answering nod, from somewhere inside, as if Jackie were approving it, or maybe the voice inside her that always knew…

… The one that had been suppressed forcibly these three years and more.

_Jackie Bones is dead,_ she thought, _but I'm alive. And Addie might reproach herself, but like as not I'm alive because she did act._

For it had occurred to her on thinking about it recently that the assassin had blinked in and then Addie had returned fire and sent her signal, but had she not been so fast —

Well, no one knew about the worlds that hadn't come to pass. There might be a world in which the war had been won by the other side. She likely wouldn't be alive at all, in that case. Addie wouldn't talk about the war, because it was a sore subject with her…

… And she preferred it that way, because after all Addie was a patient at her own clinic, and that was already difficult or awkward enough, even if she weren't on Mary's roster.

"Yule, then," Addie said, with a smile that had something in it of the child she might have been, some glow of firelight and magical snow. They turned under the lamplight, and the shadows of the huge lacy flakes floated across Addie's features.

ooo

On Addie's instructions, Mary packed her things for a three days' stay. Addie was delighting in the secrecy of it all, Mary could tell. "Meet me at King's Cross station," she had said, with a conspiratorial smile. "At platform Nine and Three-Quarters."

Mary raised an eyebrow. "So… three quarters of the way between stations Nine and Ten."

Addie nodded. "That's why it's numbered like that."

Mary shrugged. "Very well then."

"Oh don't be such a Muggle."

"That can't be helped, if you're going to keep company with Muggles." She laughed; the word that sounded ugly the first time she heard it had a rather different sound in Addie's voice lately.

Good sport that she was, she did show up exactly as instructed, though she felt awkward standing on the platform exactly where no train was going to come to a stop…

And then there was Addie, in a long eccentric cloak, valise in hand—

"Come on! We'll be late." She took Mary's hand in hers, and to her astonishment took a dead run at the wall —

— Which unexpectedly gave way, as if it had turned to smoke.

On the platform, under arched old-fashioned Victorian brick, in Olympian clouds of steam, stood an old-fashioned locomotive. They ran for the passenger carriages, and Addie leapt aboard, and reached a hand to swing Mary up.

Addie selected a compartment, and settled herself, unwrapping her cloak and flicking her wand to adjust the temperature; Mary found herself swathed in comforting warmth.

Out of one pocket in the cloak came a little package that unfolded itself as if by magic — no, by magic — into a fully packed picnic basket, from which Addie produced a samovar and a set of teacups, a marvelous profusion of snacks, savory and sweet both. Smoked fish, a wonderfully warm and crusty slice of French baguette, cheese —

—And the oddest chocolate confection, that looked like —

— And behaved like —

Live frogs.

Mary blinked. No, more things in heaven and earth, but surely Horatio hadn't been thinking of chocolate frogs.

And speaking of Horatio, she had in her drawer at home a note from Blaise Zabini, who had written her with the news that he'd be playing that role in an amateur production in the spring, having successfully negotiated his first audition.

The snow whirled down outside the windows of the train, thickening into a blizzard of stars. They cuddled into the warmth of the compartment, and except for the personnel of the train, no one disturbed them.

Usually, Addie explained, it wasn't so quiet, but the students were on holiday, and the usual traffic had dwindled to the local townsfolk hurrying home in advance of the holiday.

ooo

And in the meantime, she was happily warm, the best sort of warmth, with the snow outside the window, looking quite picturesquely chilly in the blue twilight as the train chugged equally as picturesquely toward Scotland; the compartment, in its warm reds and golds, made a cozy contrast, as if the Spirit of Christmas Past had worked his own jolly way on that, because off stage, even in childhood, she could remember no holiday like this. Her holiday life with Jackie had been a whirl of parties, yes, and laughter and song, but nothing so old fashioned and perfectly splendid—

Well, she knew that Dickens had written those lovely holidays on the dark scrim of the Industrial Revolution, but that didn't mean that their glow was any less.

"A post-war Christmas," Mary said aloud.

"Yes," Addie said, "We shall never be again as we were." Smiled in a sort of valedictory way, and squeezed Mary's hand.

For some reason, Addie loved that line from _Wings of the Dove_. They'd watched the film on videotape at Mary's apartment—yet more Muggle wonders—though for some reason Addie had flinched a bit at the sight of the dark and beautiful film actor who played Kate Croy.

A fleeting resemblance, she explained it, to a very unpleasant person from the war. Nothing personal.

There were a great many unpleasant people and things in the war, Mary agreed, sight unseen. One could say that about anyone's war, in any century, though certainly the wizards gave it an atavistic twist. She couldn't now look at Granger and Longbottom and their friends without remembering them in chain-mail and tabards, and wondering not only what they'd done in the war, but what it had looked like.

ooo

Draco looked out at the frozen lawn of the Manor, which was being lost in the whirl of snow. His mother had insisted on the invitation—Christmas Eve it was—as soon as she returned from her Azkaban visit, there would be drinks, she'd see to that, and he was to fetch the Grangers from London. Drinks and a nice selection of hot savories, yes, and there'd be sweets; she had gone down Honeydukes that very afternoon to see to it.

She'd startled, well, she told him, to see that nice nurse from the clinic, Mary her name was.

"In Honeydukes," Draco had repeated, just to be sure that he'd heard right.

"In Honeydukes," his mother repeated. "Her friend was buying her sweets." Approving, that smile. "And mind you, don't eat all of them while I'm gone."

As if he were ten years old and not almost twice that.

She saw that look, of course, and kissed him on the forehead, as if to say, _you'll always be my little boy_, and smoothed his hair, before walking down the grand staircase to meet her Auror escort.

Since the ritual at the ministry, his mother had been a great deal more affectionate.

He sighed, and paced the marble gallery that overlooked the formal gardens. Here he had sat with Granger in the summer, and she had looked at his toys.

His hands were empty, with Hypatia gone.

He went into the depths of the house to bring out the best of his toys. Hypatia loved them, and it would be a nice surprise for her to play with them again, though she was too young of course to understand the holiday. He would give some number of them to her when she was old enough, the ones that were fitting… well, that would depend upon whether she turned out a witch or not.

Something would have to be done about the Manor's wards, he knew, some time before her third birthday, because he did not like the thought of her being exiled from this place. He would have to have a word with his mother about that.

He set out the chess set, in all its antique glory, the caliph and his grand vizier facing their counterparts across the board. For the Queen had once been the Grand Vizier, and… well, in this house, she still was.

He sighed, remembering as he did this time of year, both better Yuletides and worse.

No, he did not want to remember the worse, and the better, well, they seemed to be warm with the gloating of a child with many presents. He did remember that odd hollow feeling of coming to the end of the presents in all their array, and somehow the thrill of possession was not quite what he had anticipated—well, and then there was a turn of mind, where he resolved to play with those toys he had, and to turn his attention away from the ones that he still wanted. For there was always more that one could want, a spangled array of possible playthings that stretched across the sky like the very Milky Way…

… Though once he was older there were the presents that were means to an end, such as that marvelous broom, the Nimbus, yes, he still had that about the premises, didn't he? Yes, a wonderful thing, and he went to his room to find it out among the old school trunks —

He averted his eyes from those. He had left off being a schoolboy quite some time before. Some time there would be the NEWTs and he would have to study, though he had no idea any more what it would be he would study. A generalists's training then; he wouldn't qualify as an Auror no matter how many NEWTs he collected, and truth to tell he'd never had the inclination. Nor for Healing either, though he had certainly a great deal more respect for that line than he'd had. An old-fashioned wizard, then, a generalist in the mystic arts, and perhaps he might travel to Paris some time, like his sister's namesake, and study alchemy; that was practical and the Muggles had always patronized that art most generously. It wasn't until after the time of John Dee that it had fallen from favor in England, and fallen from the syllabus of Hogwarts.

He sighed. There had been a time when one could have gone to study with the noted Nicolas Flamel. All things perished and all things passed away; Flamel and his wife had died at a ripe old age when he was only in his first year at Hogwarts.

Household charms, that was a good bit of it, and perhaps a bit of fortifications on the old model; the Grangers might like a bit of that, though really their daughter had done a bit in that line and it didn't do to poach on her turf. Household charms, then, and perhaps something in the line of alchemy, and whatever might help that mysterious business of theirs — though he'd understood that they did not care for the notion of magical enhancements. He remembered William's quip about Hermione practicing orthodontia without a license —

— To cover up the greater matter of what else she'd practiced without a license. He'd overheard just enough of a conversation the other day —

Memory charms.

He shuddered. Not _Obliviate_ but something altogether more complex.

No. He didn't want to think about that just now. Granger — Hermione — was talented enough, and in scary ways. Presently she was looking at her eternal timetables and considering the choices laid before her: a defense architect and occult engineer, as a journeyman under Madam Longbottom; a Healer, studying with the redoubtable Derwent; or some Muggle business involving spell-work with money, if he understood aright.

ooo

Time weighted heavy on his hands. Hypatia had gone with his mother, and the soundless snow muffled the world outside. Then as he settled into his old school books, on the little side table to the side of the marvelous array of toys, time ceased to weigh anything at all, as he took a slow turn, as on a moonlit broom ride, over the long curves of the future, and it began to show light.

He looked up, realizing that his mother had returned. His books lay open on the table, and he could concentrate, had concentrated, well enough for hours to have passed.

She stood in the snowlight, as the flames of the candelabra sprang to light in the grand reception hall, Hypatia in her arms, bright and alert.

"It's time," she said.

He gathered his cloak and wand, and walked outside to the snow-bound terrace to Apparate to suburban London.

ooo

There were drinks, a great flaming punch bowl on the old fashioned model, and savories; there were fairy lights, when he had returned, and from the depths of the house, music that might be played by a ghostly orchestra.

His mother smiled, gorgeous as candlelight lit the lamp of her face to rose and flame.

The Grangers and their Court Wizard exchanged pleasantries; he stood there with them, and savored the punch — firewhiskey in the base, and a symphony of fruit over that, no note easily identifiable, spices adding to the heat — yes, this time for the pleasure of the flavor and the warmth, and not to blind his senses or summon false courage.

Granger-the-younger, Hermione, was there, her wild mane curling from the snow that had dampened it, and Madam Granger, who smiled at him and then at the array of toys.

"What marvelous things," she said. "It must have been lovely to grow up a wizard child."

There was that little pang on her daughter's face, and then a sort of melancholy smile.

What he had not been bold enough to do the summer —

"We missed the chance to be children," he said.

She nodded.

"But the toys are still here."

They went to play with them.

As if time could be turned back, which it couldn't, but somehow that snow seemed to bestow an obscure and innocent light on what had passed before. The light of the candles blessed his books and notes, spread out on the little desk; that ruddy light picked out the charioscuro of the wizarding chess set, on which the janissaries waved their scimitars, and the great elephant cavalry rumbled forebodingly from the corners of the board.

He sighed. It was not a night for war.

Instead, they played Quidditch, with his two sets of players, for Ireland and for Bulgaria.

She was a disaster on a broom, but playing the game at a distance — well, it was clear that she could play like a strategist, as if it were merely airborne chess —

And she'd probably learned a thing or two from Weasley in her time.

ooo

His mother fetched them. "Come, Draco." He shook his head, but Granger put the toys down. "We're walking in the formal gardens."

"In the snow?" he might have asked, did he not see the look on her face, carven and solemn.

ooo

In the blue snowlit gloom, the white rosebushes slumbered under a pall of fluffy white, simulacra of the blooms that would grace them in the spring.

In the white and falling snow, in the starry wand-light of his mother's _Lumos_, he watched as she conjured the markers.

One, two, three: the Squibs, and their names.

Two Dracos and an Andromeda.

Not Hypatia, he reminded himself, for Hypatia had been of the Malfoy line, who had studied at the University of Paris in the fourteenth century, an alchemist in the age of the cathedrals and the crusades; she had learned her trade under a male Glamour when the boundary between the Muggle and the magical world was thin as the surface of a mirror.

His sister's name was a concession to his father, a last wish, as it were. All the names before that belonged to the Black line.

And now…

The other two miniature white marble obelisks were unmarked except for dates, for those children had not lived long enough to be named.

_Three Squibs, one stillborn, and one who lived four hours and had seven fingers on each hand._

ooo

Mary and Addie fell asleep under fluffy covers in the warm embrace of a featherbed, and the snow collected on the sill outside the mullioned window-pane. The snow fell through the night.

At dawn, Mary woke to a soft rosy light, diffused through the falling snow that had thinned enough to allow the pearlescent sunrise to show.

Addie turned to her, and whispered, "We don't have to get up."

She said, "Merry Christmas."

"So it is," Addie said, pulling the covers over them and flicking her wand a bit to dispel the early-morning chill. "Would you be ready to celebrate?"

Mary smiled.

And then they did, in the hush of dawn in a magical village hundreds of miles from her real life, and years from the war.

They would never again be what they were, but had at least the satisfaction of being what they were now.

ooo

**Author's Note:** The adaptation of _Wings of the Dove_ is the 1997 film version, featuring Helena Bonham Carter (Bellatrix from the _Harry Potter_ films) in the role of Kate Croy.


	37. Chapter 37

**Disclaimer:** I'm not J.K. Rowling; I'm only visiting her universe for nonprofit fun and edification. (No profit is being made and no copyright infringement is intended).

ooo

Hypatia Malfoy had grown up surrounded by mysteries, some of which were open secrets. She already knew to humor the grownups when they revealed the secrets that she long since had puzzled out. Her father was a wizard — of course! — because who didn't know that. Why even the Muggle neighbors knew it, when she was visiting with her Granger grandparents.

She _had_ wondered for a long time why her papa and her aunt looked nothing alike … well, once she knew to wonder. Papa was thin and blond like herself, except that he didn't wear spectacles. They shared that pale, fine hair and brows, and pale eyes, grey that was really blue and green swimming together, like fish in a northern sea. Aunt Hermione was shorter and sturdier, with thick flourishing hair,

"You used to think it was a toy," her aunt said. "Once you got quite comfortable with me, you always had your hands in it."

And her Uncle Neville would smile and say he could quite understand that, and Aunt Hermione would smile at him in that way that lit up the room.

Her Nana Malfoy, well, she looked just like papa, which made sense given that she was his mother. Their house was enchanting, and she always loved playing with papa's old toys.

Of course it wasn't exactly a secret, given that she'd heard more times than she could count how her father had gotten in trouble with the Ministry when she was three and had first discovered how to climb down the side of the Grangers' house by grabbing the bricks with her fingers and toes, and he'd been out and about on his broom looking for her, in broad daylight no less.

At least it was during the working day in that quiet suburb, Aunt Hermione said.

Hypatia wasn't sure why it was such a secret at all…

Just now, on the night of her eleventh birthday, she was hearing them at it again, with yet another secret.

She was relaxing after a very satisfactory ramble up North with Uncle Neville and Aunt Hermione and her cousin Matilda, who was really only her cousin by marriage (Uncle Neville's Gran's great-granddaughter by another marriage). Matilda was very full of herself because she was expecting her Hogwarts letter. Justifiably enough, Hypatia thought; Matilda had earned herself a scolding for at least two unlicensed Apparitions.

Hypatia had gotten to the top of the escarpment nearly as quickly.

Matilda's father had promised to take Hypatia caving when she turned twelve, and she was counting the days. Not Matilda, who couldn't leave for Hogwarts soon enough, and was already getting a bit show-offy. Uncle Andrew made it clear that he wasn't about to take flighty Matilda underground, where she could get herself into who knew what difficulties.

Matilda had thrown a tantrum at that, and declared that she didn't care about stupid baby Muggle nonsense like caving, when there was Hogwarts waiting for her.

Once back at Uncle Andrew's, Matilda had been spoken to rather severely by Uncle Neville. Hypatia didn't know what he said, but she heard the low rumble of his Very Serious Voice and then Matilda crying, and saying "I won't say it again. I'm sorry, really I am."

And coming out of the room, Uncle Neville had said to her that words trumped deeds, and he would expect to see very much better behavior in future, as befitted a proper witch.

Matilda hugged Hypatia—sticky Matilda, she was always sticky, which there was no excuse for since she wasn't a baby—and said she was sorry she had called her a Muggle. Hypatia said that wasn't quite correct, she had called caving "stupid baby Muggle stuff" and anyway, Hypatia knew she was neither a baby nor a Muggle, so it didn't matter.

She told papa about it when she got home, after the party with the cousins. It was the best birthday ever, and even though she got lots of presents she thought the best present of all was the ramble. Aunt Hermione had given her books on geology and chemistry, and a new computer, and Uncle Neville had given her a new plant, a rather scary thing with grinning magenta flowers with tiny sharp white teeth.

It wasn't in any of the field guides, but Uncle Neville's presents never were.

Papa had smiled-but-not-really, and changed the subject.

He was like that sometimes, most notably after the visits to Nana's husband, the Old Man in the Castle. She still came along with Nana; papa never did. She didn't know why that was. That was one of the mysteries she hadn't unraveled yet. She did not like the Old Man. He peered at her in a way that gave her the willies.

She didn't like that island in the North Sea either, which was cold even in the summer, as if someone had imported all of the creepy haunted-house chill put in short supply in Northern Europe by the invention of central heat. The Castle, or the Fortress as everyone else called it, was probably her least favorite place ever.

ooo

After the cousins went home, Uncle Neville took baby Lizzie upstairs to quiet her before bed. She was a very round, very placid child, but that number of people over-stimulated her. At Yule, the sheer overload of a Weasley family gathering had resulted in a magical outburst that singed the curtains in the front room.

Magical children were very difficult. Hypatia was proud that she had never given her papa the least bit of trouble.

She was having a bit of private time with Aunt Hermione, setting up the security and the user accounts on the new computer, when papa came in and hovered in that way he had, waiting for them to finish.

"Don't hack the Ministry while I'm gone," Aunt Hermione said, which was something of a joke between them. She got up and walked to the other room with papa.

Hypatia didn't have magic, but she did have a knack for making herself unnoticed, which was how she had learned so very many interesting things. Not to mention that her hearing was rather more acute than the norm, which her papa kept forgetting in his fuss about her being an unmagical non-Muggle.

She fiddled about with the computer, as if she were quite as absorbed as she had been—

—And listened.

"How am I going to tell her?" papa said.

"Well, I would think that I'd begin by introducing them socially," Aunt Hermione said in her reasonable voice.

"How?"

"Blaise got you tickets to his performance, didn't he?"

"Six."

"Well, that's me and Neville, then, and Hypatia can bring a friend—"

"Not Matilda. That girl is a barbarian. Blood will tell. Hadrian built that wall for a reason."

A sigh, no doubt accompanied by Aunt Hermione's speaking glance. "Honestly, _Draco._"

"No one can accuse me of being other than reasonable," he said, "but she's altogether too fond of _Incendio_."

"And she doesn't like Shakespeare, so let's not put everyone through unnecessary suffering. Hypatia has lots of friends. Teddy and Victoire…"

Another sigh. "Great Merlin, no. The dalliance of eagles, or Weasleys."

She laughed. "If you get them on a good night, they'll upstage you and Lelia."

"But there are only six tickets."

"I'll talk to Blaise. He'll manage a seventh if it comes to that."

"Even if he has to nick it from the royals," papa said. "I admit your plan has a certain Slytherin charm. But then there's the restaurant afterward …"

"Patterson's," she said decisively. "The flaming desserts will keep them entertained." A short laugh — no doubt papa was pulling one of his sulky faces — "Draco, has it occurred to you that she knows?"

"How can she possibly?"

"Neville told me she talked about it. 'Papa rather likes that Madame Laveau,' well, I think that would be plain as day. And he asked her what made her think so, and she said that you had mentioned her a lot, pretty much every time you came back from the Manor."

"Well, she's a noted expert on weather-working, and I should think that I'd mention with whom Mother was discussing the family archives." There was that odd shift in his voice, and she wasn't sure how she knew, but he was smiling in spite of himself.

"And widow of a weather-worker herself."

"Well, rather difficult to shut down a hurricane, I would think. Why he even attempted it…"

"One might ask the same question of your great-grandmother."

"Well, that was wartime."

"And it would be best if you discussed this with Hypatia before you take the trip to New Orleans by way of return hospitality, and make it clear to her…"

"I don't want to talk about this."

"Yes, you do. You pulled me aside … oh gods, why did they sort you into Slytherin? She knows, Draco. Why can't we just have a nice family council like other people. 'Hypatia, your papa is seeing a nice witch …' Much better to discuss it, before you tell her baldly that she's getting a stepmother."

"It hasn't reached that point yet," papa said in his tense-and-brittle voice. "Her people have a marked lack of enthusiasm about me… hence, the inquisition awaiting me in Louisiana. _If_ they approve … well, then we can talk about stepmothers."

Hypatia permitted herself a momentary bit of smugness that she and uncle Neville had worked it out between them. No doubt Neville had explained it to Aunt Hermione, because she and papa were rather thick about certain things, and sometimes in much the same way.

And she had met Madame Laveau, because Nana Malfoy had taken her for Italian ices to her favorite cafe on the wizarding Riviera, and Madame Laveau had just happened to come along. Hypatia rather liked her lilting voice and her warm brown eyes, and the stylish way that she swept her robes about her, colorful where Nana's were dark, since she was out of mourning now.

She was as tall as Nana, dark where her grandmother was pale, but in a very interesting way the same sort of person.

ooo

Hypatia loved going to the theater, everything from the glittery shawl she got to wear (a gift from Nana Malfoy) to the earrings that Aunt Hermione had given her, after she had gracefully acceded in the battle over pierced ears. Hypatia was quite sure that she worried that the next thing would be pierced eyebrows and who-knows-what, but she had read all the same health recommendations as her aunt, and knew the limits.

Her silver spectacle frames went with the whole ensemble quite well, black and silver, so she looked well next to papa who wore full evening dress, black as midnight with a green-and-silver silk carnation glowing in his lapel. It made him look rakish, though she knew it was merely a bow to his old House affiliation.

Aunt Hermione dressed in rich burgundy and gold against black velvet—an allusion similar to her father's boutonniere—and Uncle Neville looked quite handsome next to her. Percy and Audrey's eldest was minding Lizzie, who loved to tumble and squawk among her numerous Weasley cousins.

Teddy and Victoire were late, as usual, but at least not quarreling.

When they arrived, they stood arm-in-arm markedly closer than any of the adult couples. Hypatia rather hoped that they'd maintain decorum and not be too conspicuous with shows of amity.

Madame Laveau joined them in the theater lobby, and smiled both to papa and herself. Papa turned faint pink, and looked flustered, glancing nervously from her to Hypatia.

"Delightful to see you again," Madame Laveau said to her.

Hypatia dropped a brief informal curtsy.

Papa settled, and offered Madame Laveau his arm, and they went into the theater.

Blaise had spared no expense, apparently—for the tickets were seats in the box. They arranged themselves in the seats, and papa smiled at Madame Laveau and asked if she were quite comfortable. Fussing and hovering was one of his chief forms of affection, as she well knew.

Hypatia amused herself by watching the audience mill about below. There were lots of people she knew. There was papa's school-friend Pansy Black, arm-in-arm with her husband. He was a banker in the City, and another unmagical non-Muggle, a cousin of Nana Malfoy. And Gregory Goyle the children's Quidditch coach, whom her cousins raved about as the best teacher ever. Professor Lovegood, radish earrings and all, conversed with one of her Muggle colleagues there in the corner. "More things in heaven and earth" she knew first as one of Professor Lovegood's sayings, before she learned that Shakespeare had said it first.

Some of the grown-ups didn't leave off their obsessions even at the theater; she very much suspected that Professor Lovegood was talking about quantum mechanics rather than Shakespeare, and likely Senior Healer Derwent and the two Muggle doctors were talking shop as well. Auror McConnell, now she was talking with Uncle Harry down below, their spouses smiling at each other. She did like Mary Esmond, who knew all sorts of interesting things about the theater. And Aunt Ginny didn't always talk about Quidditch …

And there was great-aunt Andromeda, who shot a single glance at them, a smile-but-not-really in Teddy's direction (_you will not disgrace us_) and a real smile in hers. She was chatting with the Grangers and Kingsley Shacklebolt … who apparently was a distant cousin of Madam Laveau, Nana Malfoy had informed her. Very distant, as in some centuries, but however tenuous, the ties of blood meant something in their world.

Hypatia Malfoy was related to most of the wizarding world herself.

She loved the way that they all looked, under the electric chandeliers, Muggle and witch and wizard, and the non-magical non-Muggles as well, faces agleam with the joy of dressing up and going to immerse themselves in a world apart.

And she did adore the Scottish Play, even knowing the real history — Muggle and wizarding alike — behind it.

ooo

The curtain rose on darkness wreathed in fog, and the voices of the Weird Sisters rose among it, calling up malign magic.

She shivered in anticipation.

She knew Blaise Zabini, but she wouldn't be seeing the genial friend of her father's, who teased him as if they were still schoolboys.

There would be three scenes before that roughneck barbarian general showed himself. The witches were making their magic again (which she knew wasn't real magic, except for the bits that were):

_Thrice to thine and thrice to mine_

_And thrice again, to make up nine._

_Peace! The charm's wound up._

The fog parted and a figure staggered out of it, Macbeth leaning a bit on Banquo — face darkened with blood and aghast with dust — for a second, Hypatia squinted to make out Blaise, and as soon as he spoke, forgot that it was he.

"So fair and foul a day I have not seen."

Papa, next to her, stiffened and then sighed. Hypatia sensed rather than saw Madame Laveau take his hand in the darkness, and squeeze it.

Hypatia leaned forward, holding her breath, as the story unfolded. She forgot everything, as her field of view narrowed to the world on stage, even where the voice in her head that knew where fiction diverged from truth made a footnote.

Eventually, that voice fell silent entirely.

At the murder of Macduff's family, she heard rapid breathing next to her, then a choked sob. Her father got up and walked to the back of the box. Madame Laveau followed him and stood by his side, whispering something in her low and lilting French. Hard to follow, even with her supernaturally acute hearing, and she wasn't sure she wanted to know.

She knew that her father had been in the war, and that he had seen bad things. Even years later, the oddest things could set him off: sounds, or smells, or even a quality of light. Aunt Hermione or Uncle Neville had explained it to her. Recently, they each had told her that they had such trouble themselves from time to time, and some things would never be the same.

She breathed deeply, feeling her own heart slow as she did that. Papa had taught her that. He had learned it in the clinic.

The things on stage were unpleasant, very unpleasant, and the light and the sound and the very lines of the set directed the eye to that vortex of blood and violence. She had forgotten the dark enchantment of this play, which was far more powerful on the stage than on the page assisted only by imagination.

"Mais c'est _Blaise._" But it's _Blaise,_ that much she could make out, and that only because it was her father's voice, and his accent.

Madame Laveau was speaking in a low tone, or else making soothing shapeless noises that weren't words at all, the sort of sounds that Uncle Neville or Nana Malfoy spoke to her when she woke from nightmare as a small child. Everyone had nightmares, even those who hadn't been in the war, Aunt Hermione clarified for her. Only if you had been in the war, your mind had more to work with in constructing terrifying worlds to inhabit by night.

And some revisited those worlds night after night.

It was better, it was very much better now, everyone said, but from time to time there were reminders.

Someone put a hand on her shoulder, and she turned to see Uncle Neville sitting next to her. She nodded to him, to let him know that she saw and understood. He sat in her father's vacated seat, and she leaned forward, nonetheless holding his large warm hand.

Things on stage went rapidly to the bad.

At the second intermission, she saw that her father was loitering in the by the concessions, slowly sipping a drink—something amber in a heavy tumbler—and Madame Laveau was nodding in approval. Something medicinal, no doubt.

"We'll see Hypatia home if you wanted to go," Aunt Hermione said.

He shook his head. "No, it's Blaise's premiere. I'll see it through." He smiled at Hypatia, though it looked forced. "And then cherries jubilee at Patterson's after, if you and the hellions will behave yourselves."

Hypatia nodded sagely, keeping to herself the intelligence that Teddy and Victoire had been quiet only because they had been discreetly snogging in the back of the box… well, she wasn't sure if _snog_ and _discretion_ were compatible concepts. At any rate, she was very fond of cherries jubilee.

Aunt Hermione laughed. "Ah, bribery. An honest Slytherin tradition."

"And I'm an honest Slytherin, so I'll stand _you _a whiskey now."

Aunt Hermione laughed, and accepted a tumbler. "If I have to put up with Blaise's witticisms, perhaps that's not a bad idea." She took a sip, and smiled. "Ah, yes, Malfoy spares no expense."

"Nor does Zabini," Papa said. He took another sip of whiskey, and shook his head as if to clear his vision. "And he's rather terrifying as Macbeth."

_Rather terrifyingly plausible, _the translation floated in the air between them.

Madame Laveau smiled indulgently, and sipped her glass of wine.

ooo

_Out, out brief candle. Life's but a walking shadow / a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage …_

Hypatia's lips moved along with Blaise's rant, for she had this bit by heart. Oh yes, and the forest was on the move—how marvelously the shadows suggested it. Her waking mind would puzzle out how it had been accomplished — for she liked to watch horror films on the telly with her schoolmates, and puzzle out how they'd scared her, after the fact — but now, she was swimming underwater through a dream of unrelenting terror, which she felt along with the murderous king, even though he deserved his fate.

She could feel the breath of the Furies in the room, the cold wind of their unearthly wings.

During the final duel, she watched each parry and thrust as (in her peripheral vision) Uncle Neville bowed his head with his hand shielding his eyes. She reached across to place her hand in his. Aunt Hermione was staring directly at the stage, her face faintly lit in the livid stage-light, her mouth set in a hard line. Much as a general would watch a battle playing out, Hypatia thought: no matter how horrific, one had to pay attention, lest one miss something decisive.

Even Teddy and Victoire had disentangled, behind her, and she could feel their intent energy leaning forward instead of inclining toward each other.

And then—a flash of light on a raised sword, and they all rushed inward, Blaise at the vortex. The lights cut to blackness, then came up again.

The severed head was held up, and Uncle Neville let out his breath in a long, slow relaxation, and released her hand. "It's done," he whispered.

Aunt Hermione had that distant, stony look on, as if she had personally ordered the execution. "Yes," she said. "Yes. It's done."

Her father stood behind her, looking at them all as the house lights came up, already poised for the standing ovation.

"And now," he said, "there will be cherries jubilee. After we visit with Blaise, if he's receiving."

ooo

Blaise Zabini looked odd with the stage makeup hastily removed from his face, and his hair still disordered from the wig, amid the sharp scent of sweat in the dressing-room. Hypatia liked that tang of heavy makeup and sweat and other things, paint perhaps…

She said so, and Blaise laughed. "Don't say that in front of your beloved papa, or he'll cut you off with a shilling."

Papa rolled his eyes, as if they were both schoolboys.

"He'll worry you'll run away to a life upon the stage, just as in the melodramas…"

Then Mary Esmond and Auror McConnell were crowding into the dressing-room too, and Blaise stood up to receive an embrace from each of them. He wiped his eyes when they separated, and gestured toward a framed photograph that stood on his dressing-table.

"It's an unlucky play," he said, "but she gave me luck."

"She played Mrs. M, you know," Mary said. Blaise nodded.

"Oh, I looked her up, and they hunted up a videotape for me. Did you know?"

The two women looked at each other, and Mary Esmond slowly nodded. "Yes. Let's watch it together. I think it's been long enough."

"She was amazing." He looked at her, quite serious, not Blaise of the quips and cranks, but someone entirely new. "I felt her onstage with me tonight."

"You'd have done her proud," Mary Esmond said, and wiped her eyes. Auror McConnell nodded, standing to one side.

"And I've you to thank … though it's been a long road." He glanced briefly at papa, as if realizing that he was in the room. "Would you like to join us? We're going to Patterson's for cherries jubilee. And I'll stand you drinks—at a minimum."

They looked at each other, and then nodded in unison, in the fashion of couples who discussed things in a flash and without words.

Aunt Hermione smiled, and said, "They have big tables at Patterson's."

"Never mind tables," Blaise said. "I've reserved a private room." He toweled the last of the makeup from his face, and stood. "Now go wait—I've got to make myself presentable."

ooo

The flames leapt blue and gold, lighting all the wondering faces around the table — Teddy and Victoire, even though they pretended sometimes to be grownups already, and Aunt Hermione, and Uncle Neville, and Auror McConnell, and Mary Esmond. Papa and Madame Laveau were laughing, as the waiter extinguished the conflagration, and the confection was served up over vanilla ice cream in crystal bowls.

Blaise laughed as well. Hypatia watched in fascination as his white sharp teeth showed. On stage, that expression had been fierce, wolfish with ambition; now he laughed easily, and teased her. "The smell of the greasepaint, that's the first warning sign," he said, "one finds it irresistible, and then there's the applause of course. Addictive, that."

"But well-deserved," Aunt Hermione interjected in her utterly sensible way. Blaise looked down briefly, as if something had struck him; the green eye-liner glittered on his dark eyelids, in the steady light of the candles.

"And it's been a long enough trip," Mary said. "I wasn't sure you were going to come out on the other side of it at times…"

"Well, it's not such a foreign country as all that. 'Fools are thick on the ground in both worlds,' " he added in a pitch-perfect imitation of Gran Longbottom.

"So they are," Aunt Hermione said, "and I don't see why they hesitated so long over casting you. But you've won out."

Blaise nodded, and the smile looked quite a bit more like Macbeth's than his own, and he took another glass of the punch. "And you as well." He turned to papa, who was smiling at Madame Laveau, his own glass of punch untouched. "Eh, Draco, you could have married this sensible one…"

Aunt Hermione cuffed Blaise lightly, but with unmistakable intent. "None of that," she said. "That wasn't even funny as a joke ten years ago."

"I wouldn't presume such a thing," Blaise said. "I was only speaking of possible worlds."

"Nearly as bad luck as naming the Scottish Play," Hermione said, "and I'm surprised you'd do it, given what a superstitious lot you are."

"Wizards, or actors?"

"Oh the more so when it's both. A multiplier effect."

Mary laughed at that.

Hypatia wasn't sure what they were bantering about, but she would ask papa about this later. She knew that Blaise liked to joke, but she knew as well that jokes of that sort — that were bringing out her aunt's flashing sword, in repartee that seemed to have more than a bit of animus in it— generally hid some bit of truth.

"All's well that ends well," Blaise said, "though of course we're never sure of it but at the end of the play. Or maybe we think we're in act five, scene five and the curtain hasn't even raised yet."

Hypatia said, "So how did they manage it with the head?"

"Well, it wasn't my head, " Blaise replied, "though you will notice a certain resemblance to my own irresistible visage. They took a cast …"

"Oh no," Hypatia said, "I mean how they chopped it off."

"Legerdemain," Blaise said, "and of course if I gave away the secrets, the brotherhood would seek me out to the ends of the earth…"

Hypatia knew he was only half serious, but at least this had turned aside the disturbing witticism about her aunt and uncle getting married—well, some aunts were married to some uncles, but Aunt Hermione and papa, well that seemed inconceivable.

"And were you fooled?"

"Well," she considered, "it's a story of course, but I believed it when it happened." She shuddered. "It's a rather horrible story."

Blaise shrugged. "Based upon a true history. Just like our headlines in the tabloids. For that matter, Othello—though that's a fairish role, I would say I am most heartily sick of suggestions I play it. There are other roles in the repertoire, after all."

Hermione had chimed in, "So what do you have your sights set on now?"

"Hamlet, oh most definitely. Though if I can't be Hamlet, I'd settle for one of the gravediggers. The lowlies in Shakespeare get the very best lines."

"So if you couldn't be Macbeth, you'd want to be the Porter," Hypatia said.

"Oh, well, that's different. No skulls there."

Hypatia had the very definite sense that something, more than one thing, was being discussed under the surface banter.

Madame Laveau watched Blaise as well, her head cocked to one side as if listening for the unheard.

"No small parts," she quoted, "only small actors."

Blaise raised his glass to her. "Precisely, madame," he said. "Though the skulls add a certain _je ne sais quoi_." Papa flinched, visibly, and Blaise added in a light tone that fooled no one (certainly not Hypatia), "On the stage, mind you, not in life. Skulls in life are a rather different matter."

The conversation wore on, and turned to general matters; how Pansy Black was expecting her fourth child, and how Weasley hadn't been in attendance because one of the children was feeling poorly. (There were five Weasley uncles, but Hypatia knew that Blaise meant only one person when he said 'Weasley,' her Uncle Ron.)

ooo

They parted reluctantly from Madame Laveau and the cousins, and rather later than anticipated.

The thing that Hypatia had never liked about her birthday was that it fell too late to be winter of the celebratory sort, well away from the warmth of Yule, but too early to be spring. The wind in the wee hours was raw and cold, with a burden of sleet. The grownups were on Muggle ground, and punctilious, so there was no Warming Charm to dull the chill of it, and it was a bit of a hunt finding a place from which to Apparate.

She knew it was late, from the darkened houses.

"That always feels like a longer journey than it is," Uncle Neville said.

Papa looked at him, and then at Aunt Hermione. "Most certainly." And then smiled at Hypatia, "But well worth the trouble. Eleven birthdays." He always got a bit reminiscent on her birthday. "And Blaise is right. Fools are thick on the ground in both worlds, so my luck has been extraordinary."

"Years ago," Aunt Hermione said, "no one could see this house. Or rather they could see it, but no one would look for long." In the tone of someone telling a tale of long-ago, far-off, unhappy things.

"And then one night a visitor chanced to come to that lonely house," papa said, in that same storytelling tone. "Only because he was in dire need, and afraid…"

A gust of wind, and they all shivered, and hurried up the walk to the front door to let themselves in.

As they shook out their wraps and charmed them dry, Hypatia looked expectantly from papa to her aunt, but they weren't really talking to her, and Uncle Neville had fallen silent as well, watching Hermione's face in that way he had, as if making sure of her, whether it was a cup of tea when she was in heated conversation, or a glance across the room in a crowded party. Hypatia sidled over and sat next to him on the couch, letting her usual invisibility take her. They did not pay attention to her when she was quiet and well-behaved…

Particularly now, as her father and aunt were telling a story. "He had been cursed with nightmares, and he thought that the witch who lived in this house might be the cause of it."

Hypatia looked from one to the other.

"And it was still a dangerous time, so she had a foe-glass and a dozen layers of defense," her aunt said. Well, yes, Hypatia did know about that. There still was the occasional consulting job that would send her across the British Isles, or even to the Continent, on business with Gran Longbottom.

"So fair and foul a night he had not seen," papa said, and she recognized both the joke on Blaise's lines in the play and something that he still wasn't going to tell her. "Ten years…"

"No, eleven," Hermione said, "Hypatia was born that year."

"And well I remember," papa said.

"Such a panic you were in…"

There was some secret between them, Hypatia knew. Nana Malfoy had explained that they were foster-sister and foster-brother, and even shown her the Court Wizard's contract with its many seals, the copy that resided in the family archives at Malfoy Manor, in a very fine frame, nearly as fine as the one that proudly displayed the commendation from Winston Churchill for her however-many-times-great grandmother Malfoy who had died in the line of duty, weather-working on behalf of the Allied invasion at Normandy. Her papa was the first Court Wizard in Britain in six hundred years, continuing a tradition established in dim antiquity by Merlin and carried on by the likes of John Dee, wizard and translator of Euclid.

The Malfoys were a very respectable family, if a bit dull, for all they did count some number of rogues among the ancestors.

Though the one ancestor about which she knew nothing was the very one closest to her, about whom they said almost nothing. Hypatia had long since resolved that she would find out who her mother had been, though this was not the moment.

"I remember that whole year in the dark—as if it were always four o'clock in the morning." Papa cleared his throat, as if there were something very awkward. "You know, that whole business Blaise was teasing about …"

"Which business? Blaise teases about everything."

"I wish he hadn't, in front of Lelia, ah, Madame Laveau. About me marrying you…"

"Blaise is impossible. One doesn't marry one's foster-sister, not even among the Zabinis." She added, "And Madame Laveau is perfectly splendid. When shall we be seeing her again?"

"Well, I'm to accompany her when she returns to Louisiana… oh, well, if it turns out well, then certainly by early summer."

"Will you be relocating, then?"

"Oh, no. Though we shouldn't talk about it… oh, you're right. Superstition. Nonetheless." He pulled himself together. "If all goes well, and if I pass the inquisition, well, it will be a matter of commuting. I have duties here, and she has duties there, and there are Portkeys."

"Unpleasant things, Portkeys," Uncle Neville offered, affably.

"But so very convenient. And of course we don't want to disturb Hypatia's schooling."

Aunt Hermione looked at Hypatia then, and smiled. She hadn't been invisible at all, after all.

"I like Madame Laveau very much," Hypatia said.

Papa sighed, and pushed his hair back, in that way that emphasized his high forehead, and said to Aunt Hermione, "Well then, _Granger,_ I will grant you the right to say that you told me so."

"I'll take you up on it in the morning, perhaps," Aunt Hermione said. "It's nearly four as it is now."

They must have been great friends at school, Hypatia thought, if they could tease each other like that even as grown-ups.

FIN

**Author's Note:** Thanks to everyone who has followed this story from its inception, and particularly those who reviewed. Special thanks to Silverbirch and Silver Sailor Ganymede for the impromptu Brit-picking, TruantPony for end-game beta-reading, and all of my reviewers for encouragement and perceptive notes. The version of Blaise here is owed principally to Silver Sailor Ganymede, whose Slytherin vignettes are once more commended to my readers.


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